What the Glaciers Carried

The glacier arrives at the valley like a sentence that has forgotten its beginning — only the slow pressure of what it meant to move.

Beneath the blue-grey tongue of ice, a field mouse from some other century holds its posture of alarm, fur still parted by a wind that has since changed its name.

We find these things in the melt: seeds with no soil left to recognize them, the spores of a lichen that learned patience from the stone and outlasted every tree above it.

What does a glacier know of grief? Only the weight of accumulation, the long arithmetic of winters that cannot subtract themselves no matter how warm the asking.

By August the terminus retreats to show us the raw rock beneath — gray and streaked with mineral memory, already learning to hold the first thin gust of air.