Here in Pikangikum territory in late August
your accent is the summer of pinaceae,
azimuth, canvasback, azure
and the lines of you scrawl on my back
and the hair of you spreads roots over blunt Obsidian,
and wrinkles smooth Anishinaabe lakes
northwest of Pikangikum territory in late August
as westerlies fill the cheeks of stratocumulus,
heavy-set, blueset as slate. But, this is not love, you state.
We must wait until our bones are stepping stones
set in waterskins, and scars and bruises
are rubbed in arrowheads of paint ending on a brush;
in other words, an eyelash that winces turpentine sting,
weeps on the shoulders of words
their bittersweet scent of juniper
giving up to us all we mean by that.
Tag: Natural Landscape
Rivers Again
Every word requires a second language.
For example, there is no word for beauty,
though rivers are stories
about love, the plot of rafts,
I saw, glued-together by summer’d
Tamarack reflections
under a winter’d disfigured bruise.
Of this language,
rivers are clear about this:
only bodies swim.
Only a body holds a promised land.
Only bodies drown, holy
as the river reiterating the river,
the blood, succinct, inside the wine.
Chukuni River
This morning he sees the river
he has not seen,
because the river swirls
as to sew tatters of thoughts
into shimmering rags of
memory, memory
inside-out of memory,
the way the river combs
the landscape that palms it
so the landscape becomes the body
of its direction
and the limbs
of its intent, the way the land,
it seems to him, comes to love
the mind of the river.
Summer Day
If I could take back
every word,
now,
to settle
back between
us,
our
silence,
our highest
branches,
thinly touching.
Like beauty,
no word for ‘us’ —
only the wild guesswork
of wind, the
tips of our tongues
grasping for the
taste of it, already
tasting the end.
Remember that afternoon
we left together,
coming off
Lake Opeongo
the wind busy
scattering
its big islands of white clouds
crossing the
dash like
Thomson’s ‘Summer Day,’
you turning
to peer away,
drawing me in, then,
to the reflection of
you — green and
blue hills
of birch, nearly
transparent,
tamarack,
slender and
teetering.
Ice Out
Light is always years away,
so when it’s here, it’s gone,
like us, when we’re on 60, going 90,
your windowed reflection there
so that I see through your love,
the drink of you spilling from me
and taken by the winter molt of lakes,
like an all-in poker hand, winning you,
swallowing you
whole through the teeth of tamarack,
doing this, not touching,
encrusted in, like your spirit said it would,
in the eye pits of a moose,
taken down by wolves
on the first day we said
we knew it had to be Spring.
Beauty Lake Rd.
All afternoon
and near night
this deer
inside me
scenting for
its place
to die and lay
together,
this
deer, this
me,
we search
the sky
for it, or
the light
of each place,
to enter earth
’til finally
we see,
stepping
into
our tracks
to take us
there, the bird
that turns
air into
rivershape.
Constellations of the Backcountry
If it could, the water snake would see
how it lives in a mirage of reeds,
flat on Lac Grande. I, on the other hand,
saw it the night before, unknotting its
meteor tail through the milky way,
like a net we, before me, used up the air,
I imagine, to throw there. It made me
wonder about these sounds, too, that
this morning I hear disguised as waves,
and the particles, I don’t see,
pretending to be me. What can they reveal,
now that I am gone, and so that I may
come back? Nothing comes to me now,
but perhaps the way is to measure silence
by the years, listening for that signal to say,
“I was here.”
– Lac Grande, La Vérendrye, Quebec
Opeongo
Days spent driving north, its roads
ground down to rivers
of gravel
almost flour,
needing
to bare all,
or, at least, tired
of their distance.
The sun rehearsing its,
“where were you last?”
searching, perhaps, for the thing
misplaced,
an undying faith
that once it is pierced,
by the horizon’s arrows of tamaracks,
and disembowels into
the Opeongo,
its beauty will be grasped.
Likewise, they never hear from me, or
I them, but how can any of us
miss
the beautiful inarticulate birds
circling for roadkill
as if the world had always revolved
around something not gone,
just missing?
Isle of Hoy 