Known by the Dip

Nobody has stood on its shore. It lies under the ice near the Amery shelf, a lake known the way you know someone got up in the night: the bed goes slack beside you.

Every twenty-four days a satellite took the same picture. Two scientists in Korea subtracted the ice's slow walk sideways until all that was left was down.

Six metres and a bit at the middle. Most of it the first year, then slower, then hardly. Seventy-eight million cubic metres gone somewhere, not come back.

Farther along, one patch of ice rose a little, and past it another sank. That's all they have. No one has followed the water. They follow the ground it left,

the way, this grey Saturday, I know you're down in the kitchen from the cold half of the sheet and the third stair saying so, not from having seen you go.