Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens)
I
Among starving polar bears,
The only moving thing
Was the edge of a glacier.
II
We are of one ecology
Like a planet
In which there are 200,000 glaciers.
III
The glacier absorbed greenhouse gases.
We are a large part of the biosphere.
IV
Humans and animals
Are kin.
Humans and animals and glaciers
Are kin.
V
We do not know which to fear more,
The terror of change
Or the terror of uncertainty,
The glacier calving
Or just after.
VI
Icebergs fill the vast Ocean
With titanic wrecks.
The mass of the glacier
Disappears, to and fro.
The threat
Hidden in the crevasse
An unavoidable cause.
VII
O vulnerable humans,
Why do you engineer sea walls?
Do you not see how the glacier
Already floods the streets
Of the cities around you?
VIII
I know king tides,
And lurid, inescapable storms;
But I know, too,
That the glacier is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the glacial terminus broke,
It marked the beginning
Of one of many waves.
X
At the rumble of a glacier
Losing its equilibrium,
Every tourist in the new Arctic
chased ice quickly.
XI
They explored the poles
for offshore drilling.
Once, we blocked them,
In that we understood
The risk of an oil spill
For a glacier.
XII
The sea is rising.
The glacier must be retreating.
XIII
It was summer all winter.
It was melting
And it was going to melt.
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.
Copyright © 2016 by Craig Santos Perez. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” originally appeared in Newsletter of the Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China. Reprinted with permission of the author.