A VIOLIN IN BLUE
For: Audrey
Morning song: Aubade
a black beetle runs across
white stone,
intermezzo, allegro
spring water coda: passage.
Processional
A knotted pine
leaks sap. It hardens—
then falls. Interlude.
In Russia the time is
thirty-seven
past the hour. Sixty miles
east,
a day and thirty seven
minutes past the hour.
Antedate: opus chime.
Burning the coarsely ground
myrrh
surmise unspoiled
wafers of wheat.
Offertory: Rhapsody
Peeling, curling white birch
bark,
our flax in linen skin,
a vat of saffron to bathe
bright, grace note in B.
Recessional: Absolute solo
CELL BLOCK 43
Brother, remove the tools
marks of scathed skin,
let it dry in the sun, brush
your tattoo’s with bearberry juice,
freeze etching contained in
a seed. Brother, smudge the saw tooth
edges of your body, tear
away the bars which contain your lean flesh.
Only taste the cut red
seaweed, salt and ash, bone black
your cadaver covered in
silt, changing into a wolf mother.
Where the flesh is easily
separated in deeper tissues,
sediment loosening to the
ground. Your speech finely,
engrained in a hawthorn like
odor, you collapse into masses,
tethered to the evening of
small fractures of bark, and howl.
What can be given to a
brother to hold in the inua but laid
opened subsoil and diamond
shaped rocks, like bone joints,
formed in thumbs or in
changed hands, What allows you to slump
forward watching the water
compose your low forces?
When will you come here
needing sap and pine cone, come here
in knee restraints, leave legs and feet bi-pinnate in dune grass.
FOR-THE-SPIRITS-WHO-HAVE-ROUNDED-THE-BEND
When an Inuk leaves a round home
and enters
into a square house
he gets a
headache and gets nervous.
~Tagoona
I. LIGHT
The seal talked to me with
sharp eyes in my dream.
Altered, I was able to be
with both of you mothers.
Light the seal oil lamp,
elder women, as I draw thunder
from the sky at dusk. Water
crests on the river sound like beams
touching the surface or a
spark crystal in a whiteout.
A flare falls on the edge of
the ocean, I shudder at the black dry snow.
Seldom have I thought of
rapid growth in years,
you both with heads of hair
like whalebone strings,
white, and tenacious. I
seldom listen to only one voice
or, to only those standing
in a row in the night. They stand up
as rays of sunstrokes just
when the night turns to a gleam ripple
on the glass water. Then as
the ligature of Inuit light flux and flows
like herds of walrus,
passing along the coast, Yes then, but maybe
this is a seal hook of bear
claws clipping me to the northern tilt,
pinning me to the cycle of
night when the day slows, the wind
shifts to cloud, and the
moon shadow grows to sun loops.
It is then I answer the coal
seal eyes with throat song,
standing on one strong foot
in dance with white gloves.
II. NATURAL WORLD ADOPTION
I learned to crack mussel
shells, to collect moss on rocks,
save strewn caribou hides
across malleable tundra,
how to stop my finger joints
from cracking in frost,
to dye my hair garnet to fit
in, to feel earthquakes
uprooting soapstone and
jade, to count milliseconds
by watching a brook run, to
count cracks in an ice floe,
to drink water from a
horsetail reed. Now my ball and sockets
rub and roll like hummocks bound and rivet the northern tip
of the Rockies. I read books
until my eyes chart points in words
down 4000 miles in desert
sounds. My tongue clipped to the brow antler,
the words rubbing sealskin
to make thunder then lightening.
I guide the harpoon-line
hanging in the singing house with many blessed eggs
for mothers, for children. I
stitch you around my eyes, down my chin,
though my altered states to
remember it is you who guards me
from long ice needles. Is it
you threading the singe on my sealskin,
patching letters tied to ink
blood. I am seeing only will-full DNA
tattooed to the snow knife
for cutting ice blocks of chins,
perhaps for a house, a
shelter, a lean to in a starved storm but,
had I not prayed for this
moment, this dissension into fish or birds,
if what I wanted was to make
it until the large stocks of dried
musk oxen are gone. Then, I
choose sable day and flux night.
III. MAN’S
LAW
I think of that day 14,156
days ago, when in blackness
we first shared eyes, domed
eyes, in Anchorage,
as the place on the old
river, as the place where spiders braid,
not where laws stay on one
bank of the river.
We are in the upside down
world, where the sunless earth
came into cold and then at
once turned over to fire light.
Yes, my home where black
flint makes arrow-heads,
where slate makes knives for
sharpening fingers
on smooth, dark, whetstones,
each filed to a perfect 3 inches.
One finger per hand to point
like a ruler, to measure words
on paper a foot at a time in
concrete, paved increments in proxy’s,
in dusk and glare of another
steel box.
Mother, I was taken in dark
dawn to drink from a whale
bone cup, to use a bird dart
to catch willow ptarmigan and grouse,
to smoke a pipe made of
willow stick. I used a stone maul
on my underground thoughts
of you. I caught bees for you,
placed them in a silent box
to dry, for when you dance
in grandfather’s ceremonial
house. Sometimes, I’d find myself
naming my doll after you,
practicing for when I learn to dry northern pike
on alder poles, learn to
break their necks below the head
on the first bone of the
spine, learn to slit their bellies of blood flesh
like berry juice or boil,
their eyes in their head for soup.
Every year or two I prepare
to sod my roof, so I can make due another winter.
I make a hole in the ceiling
for smoke and prayers to rise together in song.
I remember cleaning smeared
smelt off my hooks sharpening them
to catch mirror-back salmon,
fins spread, heading the opposite way,
nosing up the river to spawn
in eclipse water when the sun moves
around the earth and all
days are ebony backwards.
IV. FLESH TOOLS
I ask you two old women,
both I have always known,
please lower your eyes to
the water crests, see the sun
stroke the surface and flick
my scaly flesh. Watch in
the underbrush a herdsman
corral caribou that strays,
having lost many to the
tundra clans or the cross.
But you resting by a fish
rack in the willow gorge
north of Lynx Lake, was it
you using a fish wheel
to turn water spinning and
now years later after wafer bread
you give me a drink from an
ivory dipper. Now I lay
in fields counting cotton
grass, I see only one of you
walking towards me blurred,
lighter than you were
in the past, less body with
hollow bones, starving
like fossil ivory like the
ones I found petrified in stream
beds or in dry snow drifts.
I gauge stone bladed grass
to you as in a small
abandoned village to the world’s full
sod house, I cast a purple
flare in aurora when a mean
low tide blows the heavy fog
inland around my body
like a veil gathers the shore.
And you see me in a long
parka, in mukluks, dancing
in the midnight sun not for law,
or man, but for whale and
blood.
V.
SPIRIT WORLD
In a feast from the
messenger I pray you
ask for me in moon smoke,
ask for the truth
tracing the upright twirl of
dark madness
into white light leaving
cairns and effigies behind.
In realms less traveled with
bow heads,
I will settle down to give
you this tight bundle of charts
and maps to find me not in
unnatural shapes
but, in bear grease, in your
bowhead counting,
along the sea, in body, in
Eucharist, in a seal effigy.
Then, when the bones surface
in late stages
of calling with coiled
willow root around their wrists and ankles
yes, then when the flare
falls into ash, ash onto the shoal,
and we at the end of the
pier, mend and sow, waterproof seams
of muskeg tundra to thank
whale people for oxygen.
After the border of flesh
and church, after the old book is read,
and ivory with scrimshaw is
used with rib tools to create Okvik
not Christianity, when the
bell tones across the sound, until then,
I will wash ashore in a
dazed white-out, hide flesh to beach
with my fore-claws hanging
limply, my hooded golden
eyes with concentric
circles, lines on my chin,
with a large backbone for my lungs, and a heart of spotted
wings.
