Watching Glaciers Melt

My father bought us this trip, he'd taken it, he wanted to give us an experience,

our eyes to see for ourselves a grandeur he felt for a first and last time.

But no one would wish to spend all that long here stranded in the sublime.

Finally, wholly, indiscriminately, it isn't perception that annihilates nature

but species-feverish motion. I could get to love plodding observations.

Gulls ride ice floes for as long as they have till the shadows eagles make

must signal them away so they don't need to turn around to the eagle,

just lumber off, glide idly back, just as, with less frequency, the same eagle does.

I'm brought around to the fears I have created, hoards of my own problems

if only to have reasons to return to with renewed belief in recurrence,

which depends on inexorable inconclusion, sheer, thunderous disruption.

Liner lumbering clockwise, just the right angle, the here in which we stall—

the walls keep coming down. Lip service to the natural world and the body.

How else do we experience for ourselves some perspective of a "world"

that as opposed to the "earth" is so stupidly, blindly, aggressively humane?

Are clouds the most yielding and therefore lasting forms to possibly be?

While these clouds appear to aspire patiently to see themselves across the sky

we marvel at the light so far north into the night, too unmitigated a joy

to write off too quickly as something banal or not grown-up, unmooring

from a world of deadened responsibilities just waiting behind every door,

Source: Technorage (Northwestern University, 2017)