BONANZA CREEK
Years ago I came here
after the lightning burn.
Now I come alone
in search of spruce hens
hidden in the tender growth.
I go deep
into your singed forest
of birch and spruce
whose roots once drank
from the blue waters
of the rainbow trout.
And resting on a burnt log
among lupin and larkspur,
I see in the ashes
beside the fireweed
a single wild rose.
CROOKED CREEK
Like perennial swallows
returning to Capistrano's white stucco
and Franciscan's in monk's
cloth the color of Raven's eye,
two green shadows arrive
below the gentle ripples
from around a willow-tangled bend
where an eagle tears pink flesh
from a spawned and battered steelhead
against the protestations of angry gulls
screeching profanities--
having flown in from where
too many fishermen flail gray water
at the confluence where Kasilof
blends and engulfs Crooked Creek.
At Kalifornsky Village a Tanaina man
mends his worn net as tidewater rises.
MEDITATION ON A SKULL
On the hill behind our cabin
I find a grizzly's skull,
fragile as a paper kite,
strangled between the matted
roots of birch and wild weeds
on autumn's forest floor.
Nothing remains
but this mottled fragment;
hungry maggots have long abandoned
the hollow of this grey and brittle bone.
In this forest without leaves
a carpenter ant crawls
through the hollow eyes
where only a slight wind
rattles in the dark hole
and the stiffening earth
becomes a silent tomb.
TALT'AEZI BENE' XELTSE'E
Hwt'aedze xelts'e'de kolaexi Talt'aezi Bene'
saghani ggaay ye ts' ezdaa
ts'abaeli det'en
luy'tniniltl'iilts k'ay' giis kanghilyaan
tuu nelt' uuts'.
EVENING AT FIELDING LAKE
This evening at Fielding Lake
a raven sits in thick-branched spruce
while rain clouds
move below a full moon
turning the water black.
This evening I walk across tundra, its long silence
unrolling towards me, plunging in the wind.
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Poetry, Part I
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Poetry from The Literary Review