In a strait, some things are useful.
Others, true, she turns to ash. 

Thrust, thus—

her head thick with arrogance, 
infection and futility.

It could be how a young wife went,
strewn with net-veined willow 
and mountain aven— 

trespass, and wreckage. 
She could write about the year 
she turned to heat and haze, 

to laze: immurmurat-, 
imauraaqtuŋa. Of cannula
and silver nitrate. Of petiolus 

and achene, about to begin again. 
Of greens as they green. Of a man 

aged, eskered. Of a confined gleam— 
to hereby dissolve and hold for naught

the soil / gravel / silt groaning 
as the tools of our penultimate glacier,
 
a glacier I might pronounce like grief. 

One does wish for words to thaw 
in the mouth, but find instead a tongue,

welt. Erosional or depositional, raised 
& visible, rift into language & grit—  

 

Copyright © 2019 by Joan Naviyuk Kane. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 26, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.