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The sun made new again
Shadows of ice
As vertebra cut through.
Beauty unlike a blown
Glass bird, patterns
Of fluted beads—instead
Silt or sand, or something
Fractured. A plain
Of grit, a sediment.
From the forest the wind
Had utterly
Transformed, a small nest thrown
Into the path intact—
Moose hair and moss.
In their blue and distant
Taper, you hold in poise
Mountains: upon
Stone upon stone.
An assemblage fine
And hidden: wooden
Shafts tipped with flint,
Baleen boxes, women’s
Ivory-handled knives,
Shuttles notched in bone
And sinew, willow bark
Nets, and bodkins’
Round slender rods
Terminating in the
Heads of unfamiliar
Animals, offered as if
To say, we are strong,
We do not steal.
I.
A bloom of influenza
Resistant to a blue
Mass, a salve. Rasp
And catarrh.
II.
Him pressing
A brown moth
Beneath the heel,
Grinding it to powder.
III.
Light like
A murre’s egg
Thrown against
A wall.
IV.
The blown yolk
Blurs orange.
Speckled shell,
Thick albumin.
V.
That now burnt
Haunch of meat,
That mouthful,
That fur of the hare.
Joan Kane is Inupiaq Eskimo with family from King Island
and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from
Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University and
is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, for which she
received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award. Along with her husband
and sons, she lives in Anchorage, Alaska..
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