The Melt Up

Ice

The Rune for Ice
means that which changes from solid
to liquid, smoothly or at the instant
of a jolting sudden rip --

freeze to flowing entity.
The great booming crack when first
ice breaks is legend above the Arctic Circle.

The Rune for Ice
is a metaphor for opening and closing
the soul to love, for instance, to life force --
the mind to radical change,
the freeze then melt of dirt, a crack of seed,
the unfolding of green which falls putrid and cycles back,
the mathematical certainty of crystal morphed
to the chaotic uncertainty of anything
that flows --

If electro magnetism explains
the dynamics of subatomic particles suggesting
reality will continue to adhere to time --
If gravity explains the cosmic miracle of day and night
depending on perspective --
If light is both wave and particle, then --

If -- then /
depend on time, but
imagine reality is simultaneous,
like spirit, or light.

It's a wonder anything holds together
even slightly --
the essence being speed, repetition,
rhythm, scale, the dance of life.

We are able to know things
because there is enough order (just)
to frame thought.

So,
we are able to observe and predict
geometic progressions of melting
that will raise oceanic surfaces on planet earth
as much as 80 feet, fill up rivers, flow into the
hollows of our world, cover coastal
cities, continents, civilizations
car lots, nuclear power plants, hotels,
libraries, dogs, grandmother’s silver --
the future a litany of loss and suffering.

Do we stand on the brink of mass extinction
or a great awakening?

Ice to water --
crystalline substantial order to --
a vast flow, chaos, uncertainty,
every aspect of reality
fundamentally
different, Earth forcing
us to re-examine
every aspect of how we
understand, live and are part
of her epistemology --
a universal paradigm shift
inventing itself from our imaginations
as the ice breaks.

©Susan Bright

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

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