LATE SEPTEMBER ON
THE RUSSIAN RIVER
The trees turn, suddenly,
as dawn rolls up what night unwound--
their slender necks
like tundra swans in shallow ponds.
There is no comforting chill
in the gray air,
only a screed of birds
scrawled on a bare sky.
Fog arrives in the narrow valley,
gray wings cupped like snow geese
landing between deserted stars
in morning's porcelain light.
A trout waves in a shadow
across smooth stone,
and while I watch, a bear--sleek and black--
crosses the river and fades off winterward.
EASTER SUNDAY
1927. It is Easter Sunday.
A young Indian girl sits
impatient on a narrow spruce pew
inside a white-frame
church. In faded black cassock
the gaunt priest's sermon echoes
off gilded ikons of Mary and Jesus
in words distant and
unfamiliar. That night when the child
returns home her grandmother will again
tell the story of how Saghani Ggaay,
Great Raven, brought light to the
world. Beyond the cabin's warmth
dusk steals across a window pane
and drifts of snow slowly form;
she stands in the night wind
tuning her face up to a horn of pale moon.
.
THE HUNTER
This evening I walk across tundra, its long silence
unrolling towards me, plunging in the wind.
In the distance, whiter than bone-dust,
a bear listens to the shape of wind and snow,
smells the far scent of an ivory-toothed whale
gripped in death's tight belly.
It ranges up through ice, through air,
to night where pale dots of light appear beyond the far edge
of a blue frontier, and the moon is a hole
torn at the top of a barren sky.
It is a scene slowly dying until all that remains
is a solitary bear clutching at emptiness;
in a moment the sun too will be gone,
hiding even its sparse embers
as darkness gathers in folds
in a far and quiet recess of winter
.
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Poetry, Part I
Poetry, Part III
Poetry from The Literary Review