Impressions From The Ice: A Poet Returns From Antarctica
Being where scientists are pulling 800,000-year-old ice up out of a glacier and you can chip it off and drink it in your whiskey. Where there are fossils from 300 million years ago when Antarctica was still in the northern hemisphere and there were forests and jungles. Or there's a place where the neutrinos traveling from 10 million light years away, from other galaxies, are falling into this ice cube trap they created, and exploding in blue light.
To be up close, and see and taste and touch, vast ancient history or faraway places was to be confronted with a sense of time that I've never felt or had that kind of scale. It was so humbling.
On the sun never setting
The 24 hours of sunlight is, I think, actually just as upsetting in a different way than 24 hours of darkness. It's sort of the feeling that you sometimes have if you're really nervous or have drunk too much coffee, and you're both exhausted, yet unable to shut down.
On what Antarctica gives us as humans
I think what Antarctica gave me is also what poetry gives me, and it's space and time not to be so busy, anxious, solipsistic, self-consumed, that we don't see how tiny and infinitesimal our own life is, and yet how tied it is to everything that came before, everything that will come, and everything that's around us.
Read an excerpt of We Mammals in Hospitable Times