| INTERIOR
—for my two home-places, Alaska and Lietuva I fly in, this first Arctic spring, like a bird
migrating a yearning rather than a route, landing
among multiple small mirrors, flashing-flashing
seizures of epigenetic memory. All that angled light haloing the soft hills,
the new leafing of birch and spruce, the complex
scent of stovepipe smoke, rising-rising
from that forgotten place where hearths blazed. And the river, its fair banks defining,
connecting, place and time, places and times.
Me, here, now, I get the little-hairs-rising-feeling
about a life I haven’t lived, but might. Above, long-necked, long-legged avians fly in Vs,
a shape both convex and concave. I weep
as my grandmother wept, her tears seeping
from the corners of my eyes, over the soft sides of a face that recognizes: These are not storks,
but cranes. Both be harbingers of fortune.
That day becomes a golden egg, with its seed
of a winged mind, its sequence of northern— according to 23 and Me—European
DNA, snaking like a river through
the ages, keeping me indigenous
to that other-occupied land I’d never seen.
VILLAGE ASCENSION
—in response to “Bypassing Rue Descartes” by Czeslaw Milosz I ascend from the river, shy, an intruder,
a non-native person just come to a Native village. Ashamed to remember the habits of my house
I accept a stew of leftover fall caribou from strangers, wipe my plate clean.
Keep quiet. Keep counsel. Keep trying to understand what is being misunderstood.
I enter the woods blinded by shade, disoriented. What options, ways, present themselves? Cut down
the tree? Climb one into sun? Wait for eyes
to adjust to given light? Meanwhile the village behaves in accordance with its summer nature,
sleeping and waking all hours in the all-hour light,
checking salmon nets in bear-gun weighted boats,
cleaning, cutting, drying the fish gathered like manna— indifferent to progress, productivity, rising GNPs,
all tended by others in other countries
with different religions and different heavens,
different songs, dances, and things called serpents.
NIGHT Night in the north, lit
by a mirror of snow,
by featherings of ionized glow
swooping through the atmosphere-electric. Night in the north crackles
through air and ice and smoke,
searching between the angles
for wisps of individual angst. Night arrives and the homeless receive it into their bones,
because it hones–in where they huddle in street alcoves:
Sometimes it needles, stings, a wasping
not possible to swat away, and potentially lethal. Those who leave late know from frosted breath that
there will be no caress without consequence:
Booze, opiates, frictionless roads factor into
these nocturnal algorithms. Night in the north, long,
carries a glittering blade
with which to cut out beating hearts
to animate—something else.
IF WE COULD The moon each month grows new antlers,
drops velvet into the night and,
under foot-thick river ice, sleek beaver fur
parts the dark to carve stars of birch limbs,
of alder, spruce, and willow shoots, and to
eat the shining, and perhaps to be snared
into the light, for blankets and dog food.
We would snare the moon, too, if we could.
You know we would. You know. We would. | 
