Glacier Graves comes from The Greenwood Poet, a book that came out last week as part of my ongoing romance with doubling my years on odd years and then writing that many poems.

I spent a couple of years, off and on, writing about the gothic fantastic and the environment and death, before and after COVID (thought that obviously wasn’t the original intent). I’m going to serialize them on the site for subscribers. If you subscribe for three months, you’ll get this for free. And besides, subscribing is free for the first seven days, so why not try out the Showbear archive?

Of course — 20% will be free for everyone and I encourage you to pick up a copy of the hardback.

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Glacier Graves

Of great glaciers and their graves in the waters
In the deep of the waves, dead in the heat, 
Which millennia loved to labor from snow
And how the hells happened to melt
Their histories from the earth and the heavens away — 
These the thinking thunders and women
Grieve as the ghosts of the greatest of men:
Ice and Hector, Arthur and snow
Are the lingering lives of the long-forgotten
Forged Foundations — Oh Fountains of Cold! —
that held back the heat from the heavens and earth
To hold in the hells that the hard ice
Had put to a slumber, prison of winter, 
Beneath the surface, next to the sea
Of the Transantarctic tunnels and peaks. 

The monsters had claimed to have made our earth
As a punchline to a joke, power as humor:
What was our first wild creature
To go into space? The great cow
Who easily jumped over the moon.
We may be cattle to monsters and the elder 
Things and shoggoths, but think of whether
Τhey themselves are thaumaturges
Great enough to give themselves
The being they bear: brightness, how does it
Linger in their eyes, how’s the light writhing?
Oh can they… can they cause themselves?
And if théy are contingent, think of the glaciers…
Of great glaciers and their graves in the waters
In the deep of the waves, dead in the heat, 
Which millennia loved to labor from snow
And how the hells happened to melt
Their histories from the earth and the heavens away — 
How Being donates to — bar none — 
Every contingent entity
And the grace of the glaciers that was given once
May one day waken and find
Its power to bind those eldritch things
Has returned to tame, totally frozen
As a fortunate thing, a fearsome chill
Both awful and awesome, early in the morning
The rise of Winter’s revenant morn,
The soul of the cold that stars great
Saves and softens so the searable things
May grow green and gift life:
Of great glaciers and their grace in the waters,
How mist freezes, may unthaw,
Might lighten, might be ice
Again and again if the good of it returns:
Hardened and hardy, here to guard,
And happy to hold in the heat of our doom,
And happy to hold in the heart of our darkness,
And happy to hold in the hells of the cosmos:
Again and again, glaciers return.

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Photo by David East on Unsplash