A scree of crystalline blisters

(After Elaine Whittaker's art installation "Ablation")

2007

by Ruth Roach Pierson

*Professor Emerita and author of "Aide-Mémoire"

*2008 Governor General finalist for poetry

shards of home-grown salt 
                
                surgically
       
        excised and hung precariously
       
                    in Petri
   dishes
     
         their shadows' glimmer 
               
                        Devon
              Ross
a harbinger
      
             Penny
            Ayles
      
of glaciers' accelerating shrinkage
    

            Melville
       
              Meighan
       
 an adumbration of ice fields'
      
               Agassiz
                Larsen B.
      
break-up into ice-pan bric-à-brac
                Ward Hunt
               
               Filchner-Ronne
       
              White

for the scientist explorers 
        
                white
 
     for ablation   the totality of erosion
 
             white

              purged of blue


white for oblivion
       
               and the oblivious
 
              white for salt and salt
 
for the coming dessication


             for the salt crystals left
 
                     at the edge of receding seas


            the salt that encrusts
 
the lips of the thirsty 
    

Accepted for publication in the forthcoming anthology Restoration Ecology, edited by Adam Dickinson and Madhur Anand.