Ice Walking, Columbia Ice Field, Jasper National Park, Alberta
The lake is a leaf with blue edges and intricate pale blue veins. It makes its sugar from the cold, and feeds the ice, which spreads its roots like a chestnut tree, grubbing for nutrients, for fish in deep fish sleep huddled between the rocks like fossils from a younger age. Long slide of melt water frozen to glass, polished by snow, moraine dredged up from February's thaw: elements added to a base metal to make it more than what it was, make it so it doesn't break. Your heart, twice tempered, but more than two times harder.
See my profile in Willow Springs, where the poem was first published
All text and images on this site © by Alpay Ulku