The Icebergs

By Taylor Light

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            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. 

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Taylor Light is a poet from Dallas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has received support from the Convivio Conference in Postignano, Italy. Currently, she is a PhD student at Southern Methodist University with a focus on eco-poetics.

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