Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
We had to have the mast to see ourselves,
as if the icebergs’ sapphire veins
did not contain enough for human touch,
or this ice grotto, conserved as a sclera,
which seemed to spill out siren songs
at tidal surges. The lack of scope and scale
distort the scene—where do we place our feet?
Can we tune our ears to hear the ice
making its fractured adjustments, as eerie
as static? Darwin writes that light
will be thrown on the origin of ourselves
and our history. The mast wasn’t originally
in the frame; it was a later addition,
and so were we. Light lilts on the smooth
ice-sheet, as the ocean hushes against ice-
rocks, enduring the wind’s chisel.
But the mast—the mast remains in the painting
like an unwanted splinter, where loneliness
and ice align.
