Not
an easy thing to shake as she defers
her
rapprochement with apoidea
over
false oxlip & phlox. A glacier
makes
a river of ice, of earth,
of
everything that is & is not she.
A
paradox: the present as a dark
text
to (re)turn (in)to. She strikes
the
bright inscriptions, which might
yet
teem for a long time.
We
tread the paths of myth, grown
sick,
like the boy who banged
an
adze until it grew dull
&
the snow ceased. & like that
which
presupposes it, & us:
line,
image, lilt. I am not quite
myself
within other declarations.
I
do not exalt with great nimbleness:
&
did not notice the lemming
as
he slipped through a hole in the fenestra
on
some annual migration to the sea,
past
himself as his own pelt-monger,
&
far past the point where he pulled an awl through the fauces.
In
these words, enclosed, too, at times
within
the old enchantments—
one
broods beyond the problem
of
being bound to place,
to
anything at all. & then,
the
ballista, too, becomes its own
source
of wonder. An omen,
albeit
one tempered by the concise
splendor
of a mind as it moves
quick,
unsick, within the confines
of
night. Breach lyric. Split time.
Will
she?— she will —explicate
the
fixed architecture as it flickers by,
“trying over and
over its broken line /
trying
over and over its broken line.”
Joan Naviyuk Kane’s
books and chapbooks of prose and poetry include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal,
The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, A Few
Lines in the Manifest, Sublingual
(November 2018), and Another Bright
Departure (March 2019). She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Kane was a Harvard
National Scholar, and the recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship from
Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Inupiaq with family from King Island
and Mary’s Igloo, she raises her children as a single mother in Anchorage,
Alaska.
the Tuesday poem is curated by
rob mclennan
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