Sometimes There Are Even Scars

& waking night after night in an apartment,
parched, I looked out the window into the dark
for some glimpse of what I’ve lost—

an ocean that held so many boats
built by men now dead, numerous
windings through scree to crown,

driveline,   cairn,   blind—
I see nothing but the sky.
Sometimes stars as bright

as collarbones gleam before
I blink, then find these firmaments
also disappeared. Other nights,

something Atlantic heaves with rain.
When the storm lifts away, perhaps it will have left gaffed fish—   surplus

for a child & another child—   to find
Perhaps I will no longer fight
the mind that might hold but one

swan, one hare, one figure.
Perhaps I will not begin to cry
because of the ways in which I

mark the months as they accumulate
& fall away. No blood. No certainty.
I might yet reek of burnt things.

My skirts may carry their stains
as I pass trap after deadfall trap,
the burin, the coffle of dog hitched

to dogs hitched to a lading of oil.

Game With Failed Absolute

I do not know the whole allegory from start to finish—
at most a white maculation, vertebrae, chasm, & clatter.

At times, I refuse to admit that I harbor designs
and disavow that I can go a day without summit

or cincture. Perhaps we diminish the paradoxical
wound of the woods now felled & the owl

that would have been, in the conditional perfect,
but a word in an indicant chain— a tense I will

have had to change while the trees unleave.
How we could undo if he had not given chase

to a pair of hares and cleaved in two— what
we do not remember regresses through him.

We do not miss a myth, do not scavenge
for wit. We glean from the vixen

while she falls always from the cliffs,
we fix influence only by swallowing it whole—

its foxhole, its fable, its cognate for pebble.

Direct and Proximate Cause Stele

Uncouth, the logic of such conversions—
despite the maker’s hammer-mark,
  without fjord
 after nameless fjord.

Foul weather abeys (th)us with another set
of questions—  to divide
  part of
   or not to sunder?

A woman is vanished into a hospital, myths—
  you didn’t fix me before, but now?

She could well salvage ivory
  from the old gun grips & brook arrows
  bone-sharp & perceive, betwixt monuments—

Poltava’s bells melted down & re-forged
to falconet & culverin. The crises of self-
doubt’s never-ending, but interrupted.
Of course the sea shall darken in the north—
& we disappear into memorial, (in)to the wood
beyond a clearing in which we find a trench.
Within such shelter we yield to cold despite
the pelt of a bear some men made dead
some days before. There, was I mocked

for having been made a mother from gold,
  from fishbone, spelled from conflict
  into cold steel? Such drops

of blood form speech, & hers,
the third splendor from the sun.

Reclamation Saakia Reclamation

kamikłuk loafer		taigun barrel		mukkaġun flour-sack
mizu soda-pop		kuupiaq coffee		taaŋa spirits
siigriiq cigarette		saaqalaq sugar		qaqqiaŋuaq host
marisiq pill		sailaq sailor		saatkaaq shotgun
	aglaaq something written	aglaan but; also	aglaktuŋa i am writing
wassiq wristwatch		miilaq soap		nalikaaq trousers
tamałhuq dollar		miisuk gunnysack		niaquŋusiun aspirin
massaq pottage		suppun rifle		saaqłaq bar of chocolate
sassaq clock		kaamun car		tiŋmiazun airplane

Duck and Cover

Counterpane

“Look how strong the wind is. / It’s taking the memory out of the trees”
—George Kokuluk

Look at us as if we live
    & inhabit our language
        when we can,
despite the plane writhing
      into its crash  —  its prang
as it was to leave Savoonga.
      There were no survivors

On Ugiuvak
    my uncles starved
          as another pilot failed
to deliver staples  such as flour, sugar   ...
    he could not land.

Instead, an airdrop.       Another rending. My grandmother—   she did not     a woman  removed from other women—  she did not beg, but bade them scrape the burst commodities   (raisins, rolled oats, & so forth) from the island’s boulders,     those that yet parry down the isle’s slopes into deep imperfection         of the ever-deepening sea

In an orphanage,   after having survived much,     too much– the reindeer station death letters from Teller to Jabbertown, the flu pandemic of 1918—   reared she was by the Ursulines. Those holy virgins. I am no hagiographer, but—   O, my bones, even the ones the surgeons shaved to save my   labrum   &   right   Achilles, hip   &   brux spare   endochrondral   ossifications   &   to   ablate the   womb   once   womb   &   now   wound   to   worsen—may   they   stumble   into   sculpture & suggest   symmetry of Latin words.   My tongue, its tongue—   feed to three tiŋmiaġruat   &   watch   them, too, lift   away.

Shot in Sobriety

I return
    there, for a moment—

  summoning back the river from its source
          bricked over, taken suddenly
from its source

Enduring the claw that, in actuality, outlives its uselessness as a claw,
the crucible of circumstance, a deterioration beyond my control—

at worst, radical emptiness reminds us
        of our humanity, as do other humans
when the romance takes leave & all we see
          could be musquash
mirage-bright, gnawing away its third leg
          to make way back to a sandbar—
down the shoal where the fish school like fish.

I cut a prism of dark light from the sky & realized /recognized it as a poem /
the way it was lit gold and hued like night, too.

Someone from a TRAIL TRIBE
        bragged
          of smoking
perfectos so tarry... one must cut the stogie twice
      (with a guillotine)
to induce DAPL to flow through to the lungs.

In a way, the animal detaches itself from truth.
I might lose myself amidst such strange propulsions.

In a way, I am fooled into rooting for a cause,
one that I clearly hate. There’s a hole here.

I notice it even in my urgent heat.
I take heed so you can take some, too.

After all, I like my beauty spooky & am
warmed by my worries when they require me
to inquire:

   where do you keep your nothing,
   & please
     can I have some?