Read an Excerpt
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
Poems
By Joan Kane
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2012 University of Alaska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-157-3
Chapter One
Antistrophic
The Sunken Forests
Just above the waterline
Jut the bone-white
Crowns of drowned trees.
They are bare, they are
Fallen together. I
Scratch the earth
At my feet: I can
No longer draw water.
I recite the ice that has thrown
The river over its banks
And move through a terrain
Of annotations bright,
New and innumerable.
Fire-felled, they gape
At the stump,
Split at the consumed
Root. I will not know how
To forget them
Though I do not know why.
The inlet in the morning—
A thin pan
Inlaid with blue: this I am sure
I have misremembered, for
Always it is a gray
Tint, clay and salt.
The sun is not a dipper
But a jostle in my head.
Rote
It could have been yesterday,
Trying to learn a pattern of water
On water or a road I thought
Prophesied and never found.
Against the backdrop of valley
I lost the flock as it flew past
For no known reason at all,
A sudden and small consolation.
I saw skins hung on rain-wet willows.
I could not fix in mind or memory
The terrible road or where it led.
Perhaps it was sleep moving
Against me, its round hill
Swelling against a flat landscape.
Iris of eye gives evidence of the sea
Growing larger; an obscured sky
Casts over, scatters and rains.
Of a day that will not want to end,
Tomorrow shall be longer.
Legend
I.
I would have been a girl bound in stone, quartz—
Coarse, cracked, and whitening as bone.
Os, echoing away from twin calderas
But for a long string that drew me to the sea.
A sixteen-strand sinnet lain on sand
Marks the rivers unbraiding, knotted,
And plaiting their skeins towards the basin,
Where a red-throated loon, shot through the eye,
Yields his largest rib for an awl.
At our junction a bunch of feathers.
I take a brittle weed in leaf, thumb chert blade
Gray. Our junction a fumarole; when it smokes,
I lose sight of the girl. It is nothing to know
The rift and buckle—
To witness the sun eclipsed for days on end,
The bruised fields redden and freeze.
II.
The sea, then, our garden: a film,
Char of oil on water. A hiss of tides
Run up to that which was burning
And has gone out. A slow
Erosion. It is one thing to
Give oneself to water; I
Wore down to a spur of myself.
A bird with nowhere to land
Alighted on a femur. A terrible need.
The land took a drink of the sea;
Mountain valleys soughed as throats.
She knew of submerged peaks
Recollected in an unheard song,
Seized in a lesser fever.
The induced shore
Keeps still a drowned order.
III.
Meant to have gone to famine
In a season recurring from wind:
It would not turn.
Into a deep snow in sleep
I shook again. If she could not beat
The lightness from her clothes,
It would become a layer
That eddied around in mouth,
Myriad, in everywhere. No
Animal stirs in the noiseless
Quick of a year of two winters,
But marrow:
Gristle of a bloated fish, roots
Split and cached, skin torn
From the hull of a boat
Long withdrawn from water.
IV.
Hers, a burial in damp
Sand by the springs. Through
December, willows green
There; alder bark reddens
Against late snow. Those
Dead too numerous; no loose
Entombments beneath
Scars of rock. Nothing roots
In the oldest graves—
Lichen lifts with a fingernail scrape.
Leave belongings piled:
The opaque white bead
Now unstrung, the unidentified
Fragment, ivory ferrule,
The small human figure
Carved of wood.
Insomnia at North
I shall yet have a long sleep
When the dark is at a stand
In the woods. The rocks
Along the ridge
Will no longer ring
Like bells, but will
Become simple, gray
And silent. I will be
Still then, and sleep
As night now sleeps,
Swaying the larch
Outside my window.
It is losing its needles.
Dry slivers of gold
Drop in the tall,
Sheltering grass.
These I shall hurry,
And envy their settle.
The Designation
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly—from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It's become a bewilderment of white—
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
Variable at Prime
It was never a speedy alchemy—
It was a desolate town
That conquered me. I lifted
My hands to my head;
They shook. It was all over.
To obscure my path, I lit a fire.
Everything about me
Seemed to be toppling over.
The waves had begun their break
Into whitecaps. I crossed in fog.
Rivulets link lake to river.
He would like to go out
Towards the ocean,
Calmer, to see me fall easy,
And easier now.
Proper
A blue tusk, a petrifying blue—there is only
One way in which everything goes wrong.
This the raw tooth that would not rot,
What is left of the mammoth. Mineral
Leached from snowmelt, a deep blue
From vivianite, a phosphorescent blue.
A stain of slow excavation, of resurfacing
From ground bruised, bursts from cold.
It is a near station. I wanted to grow
Sound, but perhaps have strayed—
Drawn to dusk again, thinned by tension,
A bark ivory, dentine sloughed away.
Stative
I.
Along the hillside whorls of wind: I collect
Anemone, blown into a two-week peak
As Grass-of-Parnassus' small bog star
Throngs the marsh below.
I pick these flowers for weather,
To ferment and powder.
I do not know their cure, heal or sour,
Or if it is my name again written
One thousand times, grove upon grove.
II.
The bucket of a man pouring water,
A quarterly moon dips low.
Fish slip from the seine: it is time
To depart. As morning nears,
Ursa Major's last light trails.
III.
Who would not dream a year of two winters,
All dullness and narrow entrance?
What a mean thing, the horizon,
So open-mouthed at gap
And close of day. It drowns a thin disc
Of sun from its height of one thumb's width
At arm's length. We can measure
Its meanness.
IV.
An odor of
Ledum twisted in grip—
Dusk placed like a seal over liquid hours.
A cogged wheel pulls the tide near, away from shore.
V.
The water drained away
Reveals a flat land of grasses.
I began to miss one of the small bones
In my hand and it hurt.
On the Border of Speech
I did not swim under the water
Deliberately, though my eyes
Were pieces of ice as I plunged
Below its surface. I do not
Have a large heart. I am turning
My head to look up at the sky
That holds no stars. To the east
There hangs an isolated cloud
Of dust or smoke; perhaps
It is descending upon a place
That has many ravens. At night,
Sometimes, I hear them.
Here, the man is hammering.
I thought I had given the world
To him again, how sad instead
That he is hurt, that his sorrow
Has formed an impossible cluster.
Off Course
I.
A drag in the wake
Of a skeleton path
On water—
What can be said of
The small degree?
II.
With its unfixedness
March is difficult.
There was a map
I carried.
III.
I think it is time again.
Clear night, raised
Emblems
Of a man adrift.
Ruins
A pebble of humid air here
At Pilgrim Hot Springs where the first
Yet return to open water early.
A flight of cottonwood flush upwards,
Or, peregrines arc courses above the sloughs.
Each fissured surface shifts level.
What I thought light now
A premonition. What the fledged
Require weighs to the balance, to
Instinct. To the carved
Ivory orb, the tedium
Of form orphaned:
The drought settling
In your right hand.
Declining the City
Altogether elsewhere summer slips under its horizon.
Burst from the first frost, cloudberries embarrass
Rud-orange. Toughening beneath a clump of earth,
Moss campion's rough taproot gilds,
Calloused edible, too. For all of hunger,
Yarrow grows obdurate, brown on the stalk:
A gauntlet to winter. Ice spindles in the dry crown.
In departure, moulted geese blanket the lakes
With their shed feathers.
Here: multifoliate night, vapor-lit.
I've beat into leaf, a thin plate.
A Proposal
If weather
and rock and moss.
If a flurry of white against the space
Where water undercuts the bank.
And herring roe clouds
and gathers on boughs
Of blue spruce moored to shore ...
A present of four deer, petty game,
Moves quiet and invisibly through trees.
Green wood grows from old roots,
Seals sleep on their backs, salt-borne,
And brightness on the horizon
Gives of a presence of ice on the ocean.
Let us turn the intestines inside out
and eat them.
Anchorage
How rapidly the tide turned, turns.
Still, turning now, gray wash and silt
Pivots on a finger of foam.
One could count time in its long
Trough, or lose it altogether:
Winter may thicken the air
Earlier than expected. Or,
An inflection in the shadow
Of the long crest is an increment,
And a small variation.
With it, we are joined, and continue.
A sharp-shinned hawk now wheels
Overhead, as each spring tends,
And shows its white underbelly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cormorant Hunter's Wife by Joan Kane Copyright © 2012 by University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Alaska Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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