Nunataq
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.
“This poem works with the geographical feature of a nunatak (a “lonely peak” or unique protuberance of land) as a metaphor for how something/one with complex features and surfaces might perennate through seemingly obliterative and inevitable forces (climate crises, cancer, colonialism, or divorce, for instance). I started the poem this spring after hiking on nunatat in southcentral Alaska, and finished this summer it after a trip through Resurrection bay on a vessel coincidentally named Nunatak with the writer and translator Jennifer Croft, whose friendship and work continues to inspire and sustain me and my children.”
—Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane is is the author of Ex Machina (Staircase Books, 2023), Another Bright Departure (CutBank, 2019); Milk Black Carbon (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017); Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); and The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (NorthShore Press, 2009) among other titles.