Meetings
Twice on other travels a wolf stood on the periphery of lamplight.
Our eyes intensified in the silent distance between sanctity.
There is one who appreciates secondhand revelations of wolves.
Sparrow hawk waves fast hinges of small capture in its apex of watch.
Where are the absent coyotes of Willamina?
Winter-sleepy mice are slow.
The salmon pass the fishers’ drift into deadline.
The count is a button pushed in the rapture of instinctual homing.
An eye squint records the shrapnel glimpses of Chinook.
Our river’s low, as manly winds blur the edges of inland clouds.
Aspiring rain is a sleepy feminine whisper.
Grasses sweep patterns of mock celestial visitations.
Otter pelts feel soothingly moist in the rich depth of velvety pelage
Small bare edged ears are symbolic of ocean’s chill.
One secret otter strip is owned for future weaving.
Otter woven into a 1Ravenstail robe is royal and tide riddled.
The otter dances on prominent lineage hidden through survival.
Copper light resumes ceremony from absence to embrace our shoulders.
1. Tlingit weaving and a form that nearly died out.
Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Woody. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 27, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Meetings’ is a poem based on the land that defines the people who live upon it, and the life that expands and thrives. A Tlingit weaving is called a Ravenstail robe, and the edges are symbolic of the tide. It had been absent from the Americas for hundreds of years, until a Ravenstail robe collection was brought back to be danced in Alaska among the Tlingit people.”
—Elizabeth Woody
Elizabeth Woody
Elizabeth Woody is the author of Luminaries of the Humble (University of Arizona Press, 1994), and Seven Hands, Seven Hearts (Eighth Mountain Press, 1994), winner of the American Book Award. In 2016, Woody was named the eighth poet laureate of the state of Oregon. She is the executive director of the Museum at Warm Springs. She lives in Warm Springs, Oregon.