–Bransfield Strait, Antarctica
We know you are below us
concentrating krill: teal
feeding-bubbles twitching
to the surface, perforating chads
in the Antarctic Ocean’s
untidy sheet. Do you mistake
the dark ovals of our Zodiaks above you,
the outboards’ hummings, and the props’
disturbances for glaciers calving
or a waddle of gentoos porpoising
like pistons in the ocean’s machinations?
And how absurd we must look
to your great eye now upon us
when you breech, our camera lenses
protruding like curious snouts,
our torsos small-bore targets—
maroon parkas ringed with orange life vests—
our stoplight-red research shack
just within your sight, the way it skins
the point’s receding knee of ice.
//
Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review and Director of the English Honors Program. He has published poems in Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Southwest Review, among others. He is the author of Out of Speech (LSU Press, 2018) and The Coal Life (U of Arkansas P, 2012) and coauthor of Day Kink(Unicorn Press, 2018) and According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015).
KLIMAAKSJON / NORWEGIAN WRITERS´ CLIMATE CAMPAIGN // NWCC 