After Bishop's Iceberg

After Bishop’s Iceberg

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,

although it meant the end of travel.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop              

                        from “The Imaginary Iceberg”

I know, and you know it is so, the slow floe…

            Yet we need to see them from ships,

            and from far off, watch them stay still, filled

            with blue air a thousand, thousand years

            old.  In their middle at least.  From here

            that age’s a guess, a melancholy, a shiver

            we can’t give rhythm because the ship’s turned

            starboard and don’t we have to look over

            our shoulder and isn’t the wind off the stern

            blowing out our carefully pinned

            hair and don’t we brush it away so some comes

            undone entirely, from the scalp, and it rides

            though who’d know, over the backs

            of arctic birds to, oh we’d never guess

            in a thousand thousand freezes or thaws

            the crack and yawn of a whole face calving

            so slow when the bow is lifted we only slip

            up the gunwale, (because we've already fallen)
            hair flat to the cheek,  

            the left cheek—a heat we wonder later, must

            have begin in the middle of that solid float

of almost stone.