Marking. I hear the aquamarine rumbling voice of ice a thousand feet deep being pulled by gravity--the groan of rock debris caught in a slow-moving glacier as it carves its signature across the earth's surface, grinding and rearranging the mountain landscape. I listen to the rhythm of meltwater carrying chiseled fragments of gravel, sand, silt, and clay through hidden troughs and millwells to form a lake at the toe of this frozen river of ice. In contrast with the bright pink patches of snow nearby--the red gelatinous sheath that surrounds microscopic cells of blue-green algae--rock flour particles suspended in the glacier water turn it a dazzling cobalt.

Light penetrates deep into this crystaline structure of dust compressed in the nuclei of snowflakes absorbing most of the spectrum, but refracting only teal and turquoise. --B.I.

I put a single simple ice cube

in my drink.

It weighs one hundred million tons.

It is a sample from the densest star.

--Frederick Seidel