Sudden Mendenhall Glacier

The oaks which are suddenly covered with a glacier
of malchite leaves, now freeze me
away from my neighbors,
the view of the Midwest backyards,
white chapboard, shingle roofs
I have in winter. Now I can imagine
that there is a different world
just a black away. The Pacific Ocean
shushing against the rocks at Point Sur
or the Oregon Coast, building frosted curls
for surfers at Corona del Mar. I can imagine that
my friend Norman, on Oahu, and I, in Michigan, share
two sides of the Pacific, and if we could look across several thousand
miles, see each other, out of our windows. Or my friend Craig could
be driving along the Coast Highway to Zuma, and I would almost hear
his pirate Beatles tapes harmonizing him towards bikinied girls. I
don't know why I like to imagine that the Pacific Ocean is just
beyond my backyard fence, or why the Mendenhall green foliage
gives the illusion of collapsing space. Like time,
trapped into glacier ice, water frozen and holding artifacts
from eons ago, the space between Midwest and West coast
condensed behind this green mass, exists as
imagination, or residue.

...........................................My critics say
I don't have the zest, the bare leg, the cutting
jag of breath of my bohemian youth, but I say
it is all there, condensed into my short frosty hair
and the sad but accepting words Medea utters
after the tragedy, and she has flown to Athens to lead
a more sedate and royal life. I say that space and time
condense; exist as the imagined Pacific Ocean just beyond my Oaks
here in the Midwest; are the residue
like feral bones in a glacier
of life forms past, perhaps even now
........exitinct.

*Diane Wakoski, who has published more than 20 collections of poetry, is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. Her most recent book is a reissue of her selected poems, EMERALD ICE, published by Godine/Black Sparrow Press in 2005.