Scandinavian Rock and the Ice Age Garden

The silence drums on in the pauses between the snores of a hell’s angel.
It seems to move like a slug, sliming its way across the grass.
In the magpie ice age, the surface darkens and whitens
as the orbit slips from circle to ellipse, and the axis tilts.
This is the advance of the Brandenburg glacier: a half-kilometer
of ice piles up and up across the valley system. From Bredvard,
Västavik and Angermanland, from Revsund, Paskallavik
and Hälsingland, from Uppsala, Rapakawi and Gotland
the marble beads scatter and inscribe the glacial information
of granite and sandstone, gneiss and porphyry. Here come
the skeletons of snails and mussels, the dead consciousness of corals,
fossils the current had ground and ground into white dust,
a half-billion years of changes to make particles a boulder:
the Baltic limestone scarred by the moving glacier, lines
in all directions with the pull of the ice from the seas and islands
no longer seas or islands.
Here at the terminal moraines, a tribe of shivering hominids
finds the erratic boulders, the stones remaining on the sand,
a kind of relict crop, the gullies the meltwater dug
as it gathered in the depressions, the eels about to die out,
the sunlight that quickly sees through the sandy shallows,
the lime that silts in the tapwater, the coral of consciousness
become physical in the glacial information, displayed in graphics,
charts and texts, pulling polyester jackets on closer,
their city a broken line on the geological map.