John Grade, Anchorage Museum, 2018
The artist first observed the Arctic birds:
how their rapid wings would send a rush
through twig-sized willows and boreal sagebrush.
Routinely, the terns flew in dense numbers,
a murmuration that would rise and fall.
He theorized the flight patterns of birds
mirrored that of glacial hills—their cores
were made of ice and, every year, a small,
hydrostatic force would make the hill
more moonlike. Until the ice began to melt—
water collapsed as flat as wings, a felt
depression above the ice core’s still
stature, awaiting another winter. The artist
confessed: I wanted to be within a murmur
of birds, to be inside an ice core, a room where
the act of a heart sounds like the Arctic.