Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Anne Coray

Of the North

Brief, the Alaskan summer, but long the light
of early July, when one can sit up late
to sky-watch and wish only that wishes
attain the night's suspension.
Insects cluster and cruise, then join again,
their bodies a small galaxy
against a backdrop of indeterminate blue.

Whoever is here should be quiet now.
Whoever's thoughts have drawn up a chart
to the headwaters of the self's image
should set it down.
Look — what if we're going nowhere?
What if time is our most famous fabrication?
Up there, somewhere, all our longings

and desire for detachment from desire
spiral into a print that seeks no resolution.
Maybe the final lesson is to learn to spin
while stars, invisible, form the shape
of a great bear, and go on burning and dying
regardless of the season
or when on earth their shining will ever be seen.

 

Snow

In every village
across Alaska
it is falling,

on the four-wheelers,
the Tundra II's, the Argos,
the parked skiffs

with their Evinrude
outboards, shifts in forward,
on the discarded

bottles, mittens, cartridges,
socks, wheels, tires, tins,
on the ravens, their bodies

gouached from ebony
to soot, to shades
of ash, turning

the color of bone –
thickening, building,
everything layered

white.

 

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