Boots in the vestibule sop a wad of rags.
The front brick stoop, sidewalk, pothole street
a laminate of ice.
Inches: four slosh over galoshes’ toes,
nine, the laces’ dead-end knots.
Ten deep, easily, creek at the curb.
But never mind.
Ask about when the boat captain in Alaska
stilled the engines in the middle of the bay.
Land nowhere, silence everywhere, no silence
at all. A crackling
field of blue-chunk breakaway bergs
bobbing, boisterous
free spirits until rewelded
in winter as one.
At a distant edge the sea
hardens into a white terminal massif,
landless and land.
Cliff walls rumble, calve, tumble
and the mask of the glacier’s grimace collapses
and slowly sinks.
But never mind that.
Its miniature offspring click and whistle,
romp. Jostle.
Little cousins waist deep, an inflated
backyard pool.
Denise Bergman is the author of five poetry books: The Shape of the Keyhole (2021), Three Hands None, A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea, The Telling, and Seeing Annie Sullivan. All are book-length poems. She edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry.
