The purged caribou heart. First arctic
meal prepared raw, before fire. Before fires
purpled meat, meat was ulued off to serve
an open mouth. First heart’s crevasses
stretched like caribou cut raw. Protoheart
raw in search of fire, red windburn revealed
the body. Blood wanting of new heat
lived in the body raw. Open arctic, first
blood transfusion was what caribou purged
fed into veins as freeze threatened the heart.
ALASKAN GEORGIC
Something animal died underneath the stilted house.
We shovel it and leave it to tundra so we can empty
our life outside. We shut away winter, parka furs
in the freezer. We don’t need to talk for the body
to know death is animal, know animals hide
to empty their lives. Sick, they will seek and find
shelter from near dark to isolate in the even darker.
We talk of how life dimples the glacial tundra soil.
With a rinse, the muddy buckets later hold
salmonberries ripened in the crotch of tundra shrubs.
OWN ALASKA
1.
Hunger is—the mouth wants
but cannot stomach a way to say what
we find
we need
from a day open and willing to give.
2.
My Alaska need: animal. There
it is: a desire, animated.
3.
Some desire forms
work on what we are.
SEPARATIONS
1. WATER WORK
Exposing paddle into ambient Arctic
Ocean, one ear placed onto the air end
To listen against wood, you hear whale
Song—here at least the mind is touched.
2. TUNDRA WORK
Ask life to soften, to harden. Sedge
And ground ice in the palm. Mention
Melts into circles. Here I am without
You. Here not without you.
SHARED NETWORK
First, the citation of one bull caribou on tundra—
dangerous, this unsettled place
empty of most of us. Then the mind
hunts directions to survive, thousands
of years along temporary trails formed
as if there is a pattern we don’t spread,
as if we hadn’t lost the path of rivers—
carbon steel is ice puncturing ocean,
cold in how it punctuates the end—
second, resources crease in this public folder of land.
If the body must script a religion to settle hurt,
to erase one world requires terrain
we turn off. First winter storm
is not enough to cover an absence,
not enough for us to scrape frost
blanketing eyes. The inverted bowl
of the caribou hoof print is empty.
Inside, vibration amplifies arctic
wind with scent of blood—third
in the kitchen, estate papers gather into life.
WHY NO TREES
Arctic permafrost carries
snowpack in months of cryptic quiet.
Here is surface seeking light. Here
and disposed to each winter’s religion,
tundra severs roots, separating desire
from what lives in the body. No trees
because for winter months, life follows
ice in uneven absence, colored by
aurora borealis. Because if we were air,
we could trace sky, make a forest of it.
POLAR NIGHT
A form of want
in a fake day,
I hold in mind
a negative
tilted below
arctic circle.
It develops
cold demands,
an Alaska I take
as some desire
takes darkening
to freeze over.
MELT
1.
Rebuild sinking life into one
Caribou. Scaffold fur and tendon
And bone. Know her eyes. Seek
Trails toward some granule belief,
Then render a meal. It is here
Life lives the network of herds
Bedded along troubled permafrost.
Flatness engineered sightlines—
Caribou beneath sky. Here are no
Buildings the size of wars.
2.
To tear open Alaska. Caribou
Liver. Whale heart. Puddled
Atmosphere, red-eyed desire.
Tundra heated with trouble
Burns. Sea ice torn apart
From its Alaska. You inhale.
To tear open Alaska. Caribou
Liver. Whale heart. Puddled
Atmosphere, red-eyed desire.
Tundra heated with trouble
Burns. Sea ice torn apart
From its Alaska. You inhale.
3.
When I say you are here, I mean that
Here is where we believe our form
Against flatness, that flatness
Permits us our shape. There is no you
Separate from I, separate from iced-
Over tundra. No absence felt,
Not here. No absence
Separates from here. Blanked by rising
Coastline interiors set against, you
Say nothing for it to be there.
When I say you are here, I mean that
Here is where we believe our form
Against flatness, that flatness
Permits us our shape. There is no you
Separate from I, separate from iced-
Over tundra. No absence felt,
Not here. No absence
Separates from here. Blanked by rising
Coastline interiors set against, you
Say nothing for it to be there.
4.
One migration waiting to catch—
No sky that is not land.
No land that is not water.
Take melt that is Arctic Ocean.
Take a prop plane to caribou
Acreage. Take polar bears inland
Hunting life. No day that is not
Night. No night that is not
Less. Sky and water, one eye.
One migration waiting to catch—
No sky that is not land.
No land that is not water.
Take melt that is Arctic Ocean.
Take a prop plane to caribou
Acreage. Take polar bears inland
Hunting life. No day that is not
Night. No night that is not
Less. Sky and water, one eye.
A SCOURGE INTERPRETED
Missionaries left a Bible. Inside it storms
dust to cover our belief held with rods
tight in hand. Says not melt but dust
is where belief breeds mosquitoes. Let it
not be the arid or unformed we strike
as debris, but glacial desire broken off.
What you cannot do is strike into absence
as it infects entire forms of air you need.
That a scourge can form as a roller chain
hauls absence away. That it finds the need
to smell into Alaska air is warmth in that
a swarm finds us, absence it breaks like ice.