A ravine southeast
of Stockbridge, surrounded by
rare New England old-growth
forest, scattered with piles
or rock, thick with moss:
ice can linger beneath
the crevices of layers
well into summer, due to
north-south orientation,
keeping it cool, dark.
Herman Melville depicts
the narrator in Moby Dick
espousing Ice Glen
in superlatives, “It was
a wondrous sight. The wood
was green as mosses . . .
the trees stood high and haughty,
feeling their living sap;
the industrious earth beneath
was as a weaver’s loom . . .”
Its immemorial character
transposed itself upon me
that summer I hiked
Ice Glen’s trails to Laura’s Tower
from whose panoramic view
the Catskills can be seen emerging
68 miles west, Mount Greylock
due north, and the Green Mountains
spreading 50 miles beyond
in southern Vermont, I stood enrapt.
I witnessed cedar waxwings
passing berries among their flock.
