Terminus: Cameron Glaciers by Kevin Craft

 
 
a decorative line divider with curled ends and a snowflake at the center.
 

The Cameron Glaciers: Cantata for a Melting


There but for the grace

There but for the gouge and grind

I walk upstream to pass the lapse in time


Hopping like a wren in the shadow of the Pacific

All ecstatic fern-drenched clamor

Ringing the girth of a towering fir


Soaking up the countenance of a western toad

There but for the great oxidation

There to grease the northern ice sheet


10,000 years ago pulled down like a blind

Retracted into the spool of itself

With a sudden thwack the fragments


Left behind I can’t say how long I waited

Dallying in retrospect one flake stuck

To its shadow another struck from stone


Layers of mist condensing into hoar frost

No shale too sharp to cut through breath

Abated snow on snow upgraded


To hammer honed to chisel fastened

There but for the cirque and wheel

There to carve a mountain steeped in silence


So old it forgot there’d ever burn

A thing like speech a tongue to strike

A name from tundra thunder grin


A cliffhanger where the air grew thin

Tossing out gear teeth like rhetorical

Questions what are we doing


Where are we driving to in this Holocene

Hothouse anthropomorphic

Ambulance dripping like an IV


There but for the three ring circus

The bucket list the washed out wish

Triptych shields disbanding under the weight


Of summer’s least likely blue leaking from within

The trident hydra-headed in all its thrashing

Pulling another all-nighter


To master the trivial in pursuit

Three forks gathering up the small talk

That trace of milk the salmon swallow


Up the gravel-braided stream

Like memory unraveling at three removes

Down a medial moraine the bare ice


Almost weeping the river gushing full of voices

All those silences gored and peeled away

Babbling a lullaby to a solitary hiker


To stall my thirst

I roll a pebble beneath my tongue

Cameron Gray Wolf Dungeness


Arête-serrated moss-dabbled the river softer now

The snowshoe hare in summer brown

The swallowtail in jungle garb above the ice


North facing who navigate by drip or leap

Across the creek in spate spilling its secrets

The pebble dribbled the boulder strewn


The last erratic dropped at the vanishing point

There but for the grist and till

There to spit the glacier’s lasting shine

 
a decorative line divider with curled ends and a snowflake at the center.
 
A man in a warm hat and insulated jacket stands in front of a mountain fire lookout.

"I am guided by the natural history of language, its fossil record in etymology, its shape-shifting churn in the substrate of memory, family, and cultural identity, as reflected in our extended geography—the flora, fauna, and geological record of the Pacific NW.

"I think of poetry as a mode of inquiry, a method of investigation, a direct encounter with the wild animal fact of time and place. A poem is a core sample, a deep dive into layers of sound, meaning, and understanding. Where language finds or fails the world in motion, I am drawn to both history and possibility—all that is lost reinventing itself, remembering itself, generation after generation, like glacial flour in the melting stream. My poems illuminate that past which is present, the forms which survive our vanishing.

"I have been hiking and climbing in the Cascades and Olympics for three decades now, tracking mountain ecology through the seasons. The Terminus project has helped bring a sharper focus to the kind of ecological inquiry I, like many writers and artists, feel most engaged in now: how to reckon with enormous change, much of it the result of our own heedless activity on the planet. Despite everything, I still recognize hope in the storytelling geology of mountains and forests, rivers and canyons—where deep time enlarges our sense of responsibility to each other and the natural worlds we serve." -Kevin Craft

Meet the artist: Kevin Craft

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His previous books include Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2005) and Vagrants & Accidentals, published in the Pacific Northwest Poets Series by the University of Washington Press (2017). He is the recipient of fellowships from Artist Trust, The Camargo Foundation, The Bogliasco Foundation, PLAYA, and MacDowell, among others. In 2022 he was an Artist in Residence at Olympic National Park. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves Publisher and Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.

You can see more from Kevin here.

 
Paired photos of the same aerial mountain view, labeled 1970 and 2010. The glacial ice on the mountain has diminished and fragmented in 2010.

More about the Cameron Glaciers

These small glaciers occupy cirques on the north slopes of Mt. Cameron and feed the Dungeness River watershed. Though lingering winter snow covers much of the small glaciers in both images, the reference arrow illustrates thinning where glacial ice was clearly visible in 1970.

 
 
a decorative line divider with curled ends and a snowflake at the center.

Last updated: April 19, 2023

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