The quasi-mythical events detailed in “Glacier” occurred when I climbed to the rim of Arapaho Glacier in Colorado (12,250 ft.) with fellow poets David Yezzi and Charles Doersch in the summer of 2010. It was my first time hiking such an incline at that altitude, and I fell a bit behind my companions. At the top, we opened a bottle of wine, and I marveled at the view over the edge of the glacier. When I wrote the poem, I had in mind a symphony, and I wanted to grapple with the romantic gestures of the Teutonic sublime. At first, I found myself, naively, hoping to grasp my own inner turmoil in the surrounding landscape, indulging what some term the pathetic fallacy, an unforgivable lapse, though I feel I kept such urges largely in abeyance. It is a considerable departure from my usual style, and it is most important to me now for its musical dimensions. I first read it aloud at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Carmine Street Metrics series. David Rothman was in New York from Colorado, and he jumped up on stage and played some impromptu piano to score my reading of the poem. I wish I had a recording of that. In place, I have recorded the poem sans score and embedded those recordings here for you to hear, if you like.

The poem appears along with two others from my work-in-progress Welcome to All the Pleasures over at the Oxonian Review. Click here to visit. While there, have a look around at some of the excellent criticism and essays on offer.

Glacier

August

At the timberline, the air, lush and cold,
Begins to thin in strumming rain.

We rip at white flukes of broiled chicken
Beside the abandoned mine, where the path

Splits. “When you take a first step, you must keep the path
To its end.”

++++++++++++++Rivulets spin and hiss through slim crags,
Lured to remote oceans, many months from now.

A wet pain is still small in my new boots.
As we march, our fingers brush drops from lake-blue

Match-heads of phosphoric flax and larkspur.
Peaks score the fog like faint cathedral spires

Or sails confronting the dusk of a restless coast.

2.

My slower spirit lifts in a soft shower
As we gain the stony approach to the peak.
I start to hate the two who rise above me,
Their lurching torsos lost amid the rocks.
I’m dragging like an anchor in their wake.
I stake my steps slowly, one, then one,
And imagine a procession where I must
Brake, hesitate, and advance in a kingly way,
Held back by custom rather than nature,
Though my stop-motion stance is not a king’s
But a beggar’s, burdened, abused in retreat.
Lady Gravity wants me at the bottom.

Valleys plunge in squalls. Shadows lurk,
Spread over the dizzying view, a smeared rainbow
Arcing to incise luxuriant banks of fir.
Far below, aspen lines grin like baleen.
My lungs scald and gulp.
My veins punch hard—high-caliber and hot.
My soaked head bobs and tows as if in a tide.

Rainwater decants effortlessly,
Glinting in slim mercury veins
Over granite’s gray scabs. Tiny trumpets
Speckle the bouldered ocean of green incline,
Tilted like a wave that swells and will take
A million years to break.
++++++++++++++Summer thaws
Behind us. Above, murky Cretaceous monsters
Breach and loom, but we aim all afternoon
To their callous brunt, their ferocious slant,
Whale’s barnacled snout, barren meadows
Of a brutal seafloor a million years ago.
What furnace abandoned this dark form?

4.

We arrive at the rim, where the glacier slips,
And gaze down. The glazed precipice rapidly
Opens an ancient scarred cavern in me.
It slows and molts, until a numb seep,
And I am suddenly softened,
Affection exhaled, and tranquility.
The others toe the high edge, pose like heroes
Over the vast bowl of ice and rain.
Did they defeat me? Was there a war at all?
My subterranean core surges
Like the brass tablet of the sun,
Smoldering and nearer now, glowing through
The treacherous reaches of a receding storm.