In 1959 my future husband, eager teen,
visited Glacier National Park, hiked up Curly
Bear Mountain. He talked of it often, meant
to go back, took me at last in 2009. I walked
to St. Mary’s Falls alone, his hiking days over.
The glaciers were shrinking, distant, unlike
Alaska’s Glacier Bay where we watched
up close from a too-large cruise ship as small
pieces came unstitched from massive ice.
“Calving” it’s called, a natural process viewed
from an unnatural city. The ripped seam reported
in Antarctic ice creates no calf: a beacon of danger
for the northern glaciers, for the world as we know it.