Edited by Dava Sobel Absent of taproot, the black spruce leans madly where permafrost slumps into thermokarst. Who wouldn’t fall down soused when the ground beneath began to melt, to buckle and sink? Who wouldn’t drink? In the boreal forests, in a landscape staggered with lurching birches, ice is a memory, while farther north, where glaciers begin to thin, ice is memory, or the keeper of memories, a kind of collective mind in which buried deep are layers of ancient volcanic ash, soot from fires primeval, banked bubbles of archaic air— stories stored, frozen, in cerulean cerebral cortex, a vortex stilled, which soon may spill. The polar ice, in stripes, remembers what we weren’t here to recall, but as with all memory, what is buried in the blue yonder—if it escapes the icescape— could kill us. Deep memory is a danger zone. Ice is another nether. No wonder it numbs. No wonder it burns.
Absent of taproot, the black spruce leans madly where permafrost slumps into thermokarst. Who wouldn’t fall down soused when the ground beneath began to melt, to buckle and sink? Who wouldn’t drink?
In the boreal forests, in a landscape staggered with lurching birches, ice is a memory, while farther north, where glaciers begin to thin, ice is memory, or the keeper of memories, a kind of collective mind
in which buried deep are layers of ancient volcanic ash, soot from fires primeval, banked bubbles of archaic air— stories stored, frozen, in cerulean cerebral cortex, a vortex stilled, which soon may spill. The polar ice, in stripes, remembers
what we weren’t here to recall, but as with all memory, what is buried in the blue yonder—if it escapes the icescape— could kill us. Deep memory is a danger zone. Ice is another nether. No wonder it numbs. No wonder it burns.
