Rubbing My Mother’s Bald Head
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
More like a pear than stone, still soft
and with the bruises of age, the smooth skin speckled
with liver spots, like rainbow trout rolling
at the surface of some mountain creek, a sage
scarf cupping her head, marking
contours we had never seen as children,
the sharp curve of her cheeks, yellow and raw,
eyes, swirls of amber—darker now, and dull.
One night, in the bathroom, the scarf
came off easily enough. Even I, her
son, am timid to touch, holding my breath,
my wide rough hand grazing blond stubble.
When our eyes meet in the glare of the mirror,
I can’t help but smile; she can’t help but cry.
I let my hand make several passes over
her skull, each divot and groove—no
distance between us, fingers and lobes, temples—
fingerprints marking my maker.
Let her head be my magic lamp, tarnished and intricate,
my crystal ball, holding something greater than itself—
Let the sun burn back into the sky, reflections
from her shining head, little gifts to the world,
Let this gentle rubbing bring something worth
hoping for—
hands on our own heads, feeling, like we always
have, for answers, eyes closed, sensing what’s almost
palpable — the shape of things below.
_____________________________________________________
One Summer With The Inuit
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I ate the blubber of a beluga whale, both raw
and boiled, caribou steak, jerky, scraps and Arctic Char.
I walked past junkyards and graveyards,
clapboard shanties, shipwrecks, and stone cairns,
past children with infant daughters and silent sons.
I drank instant coffee in seventeen different houses,
walked to the rhythm of four wheelers and guttural
conversation — I wore polar bear pants and mitts
and learned how to throat sing, lusted after women
with hard features and weathered skin.
I watched a wolf dog named Balum kill a white goose,
then wander away — the bird’s body swaying limp
in the jaws — saw the aurora rip the stony sky
into a labyrinth of color, while on the far horizon
lightning blinked amber streaks like roots or veins
of heat, rising from tundra to swollen purple clouds.
I paused to sit on a gnarled tooth of granite growing
longer and more narrow as the tide crept away.
I traded a knife and an old guitar for hides and mukluks,
met a hunter who bragged about killing walrus just for their tusks.
I watched an old man carve a figure out of bone,
then scratch a crude face into the middle,
let a woman named Serena cut my hair and wild
beard, listened while she talked an endless song
about her life, time in Winnipeg, her family of shamans.
All this I have gathered—
and I still don’t know the world through bone,
a world of sea ice and dog sleds, of drinking
Drano and getting out on the land,
where Inuit means the people and the tundra
gathers black flies, and summer lit skies,
but can’t truly let me in.
_____________________________________________________
Six Ways Of Looking At The Moon
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
1.
To the Greeks
moon first meant
month, a way
to measure the shape of time.
The Japanese saw a rabbit
making rice cakes.
2.
It is not the earth
rolling away from light
that matters, it is
what follows—
the sky splayed wide, spread open
with color, blood-
orange nectar,
wet-lipped horizon,
scarlet rising
through the sky’s alchemy,
gold learning what it takes to be blue,
and the crescent moon¬—
hung like a boat made of light,
and sinking.
3.
Thousands of scallops washed
up on the beach,
snapping open and shut,
thirsty mouths
calling after each wave—
a thousand moons
winking in sunlight.
4.
The moon pulls
at water, like curtains drawn
wide, then reaches
inside my wife
and releases
another small moon
and the tide.
5.
Tonight, the sky is spilling
light, becoming the folds
of her skirt, copen blue rising,
the moon,
a curving sliver, sharp
and pale and white as her eye,
that milky arc consuming
the unlit portion of itself,
swallowing me whole.
6.
In a dream, I had a daughter
I called Patience. She held
a cube of sugar on her tongue
just long enough to round
its corners, then smiling,
the small moon rose
like a story
between her lips.
_____________________________________________________
A Sound That Meant Home
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Once, my mother’s voice was a sound
that meant home.
. It was not
the words, but the small bird
she kept in the careful nest
of her mouth and the way
the bird would wing out
whistling.
. It was about
the way her voice could build
walls around me, cedar breath
and windows wet with light.
It meant summers in thick stands
of hemlock, raspberry patches
and shade so thick you could
swim through it.
. Her voice
was the whisper of hourglass sand,
the hum of a fan while I slept,
it was paper birch leaves asking
questions of the sun, water pooling
on the lawn in spring, and the wind,
rippling through me.
_____________________________________________________
This Is What It Means To Say Seattle, Washington
(After Sherman Alexie)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pigeons simmer incandescent in
dirty light, the smell of cedar boughs
and salmon, crab legs on ice, poking up
violent as cactus blooms. Stippled
crates of fruit, hand-knit sweaters, sweet
honey sticks and comb, guitar licks
ringing from brick, bodies swerving
in roundelay, following smell
as water follows gravity, this braid
of flavors, flavors
resting on the tongue like a song.
….
Mt. Rainier, knob of crevassed pearl,
stone thieving blue from sky,
panorama of peaks whittling air, east
and west, two ranges like rows of teeth
spread wide, the city splayed out like a tongue,
Lake Sammamish, Lake Washington, Lake
Union, Puget Sound, rained, raining, rain—
this mouth knows no thirst.
….
Rain-wet cardboard signs, quiet
corrugated mouths saying please and
thank you, slurring sometimes their words,
loving especially the sounds of need
and veteran and anything, loving the sounds
of windows rolling down, fingertips searching
the insides of pockets, whispered dollar bill lullabies,
that prodigal aria returning home.
….
Cul-de-sac abode, heather, lilac, rhododendron,
ubiquity of moss, Madrona limbs rust
or blood colored, like skin rubbed raw.
My mother and father working the weeds,
stooped like boulders on the lawn.
The juniper my brother carved
into a coat rack when he was seven.
Before we moved in, they buried
a stream that flowed right through the yard,
and now we only hear, like small bells muted,
a wet song murmuring below.