This was what we’d paid for, the boat’s long sit and watch.
The cruise brochures explained how many miles distant the glaciers were,
but they looked five hundred feet away.
Rough squares of ice that must have been the size of city blocks.
There is a blue that inhabits the glaciers
deep within and on the surface, blue in and on white.
Otherworldly.
The glaciers push themselves steadily forward to the fjords.
They have been doing so for eons.
And when they reach the water’s edge, they calve,
a roaring slow drop into the gumbo of water and ice chunks,
floating sea otters surprisingly safe. That blue holds, too,
in the floes and bobbing hunks in the frigid sea.
Glaciers recede as they push forward, now that our world is hot.
In this simultaneous gain and loss, loss is winning.
What shelf will hold the history of glaciers?
What camera can record that blue?
This poem first appeared in My Song is the Light (California Poets in the Schools, 2007).
—
Cathy Barber’s poetry has been published across four continents, including in Slant, SLAB, Kestrel, The Hopper, and has been anthologized many times. She is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and makes her home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where she serves on the board of Literary Cleveland. She taught for many years with California Poets in the Schools. Chapbook: Aardvarks, Bloodhounds, Catfish, Dingoes (Dancing Girl Press, 2018); full length book: Once: A Golden Shovel Collection (Kelsay Books, 2023).
