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I dreamt the spirit of the codfish:
in rafters of the mind;
fly out into the winter’s
blue night;
mirth off alder tendrils sashay;
while I set up
my winter tent;
four panels long—beams suspend
I sit & pull blubber strips aged in a poke bag;
I’m shadowing the sun as a new moon icicle
time melts when white hawks come.
Copyright © 2020 by dg nanouk okpik. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
She paddles and streams
her kayak up Kobuck River.
At daybreak,
she passes the salt flats into
the glass water; she skims
I have died so many midnight moons,
most of night soil not realized until later.
In peculiar sleep, caught by a night-latched
mind like some dark dew on the breaching hips,
resemble a red blossom, birth & blood is the rose.
I pang & I hurt but a summons in black snow,
of ukpik, calls as white snow owls on black earth melt,
our catching eyes lock in deadbolt time & ukpik calls
moonlight across tundra, on a level plain
with a photoreceptor stimulated by light
floating to the blue hue of dawn.
A remnant conceals
things I can’t
change, a blue
glacial memory
reveals:
light’s sharp edges—
I lean.
As if my body—
subdued
by brittle, gutter, brim
ice. Finding a chickadee’s
feather on a snowflake,
while lost in slumberous,
smooth, blue, smoke.
I awaken to a chirping,
flock fly overhead.
Indeed grace.