of the land (little poems)

{over the fens t0 the elk range mountains}

I'm going back in time for a moment here -- these are poem-bits from the early summer that I haven't gotten to posting 'til now. I've been working at them for a long time, stirring them about. My writing process is definitely becoming longer, it has this complicated distillation process now, that hopefully does help age it to some sort of goodness. Anyway, these bits aren't done yet, I don't think, but they wanted out.

As much as I love sub-boreal autumn -- golden crabapple - bleachedbone wheat - red amur maple - little shining scarlet kalyna - scent of deciduous rivervalley decay -- I have yet to visit Kananaskis in the fall-time & I would very much like to.

***

of the land

*one version of the Napi story from a Blackfeet elder, Chewing Black Bones

i)

i remember my father
saying to me once –

out of the trance of hiking bells
as we were standing on a ridge of kiska-tha-iyarhe
we clung to it lichens on rock –

i wish i could...

i remember my paper map fell
on the sweet sphagnum moss by the creek,
orange wood lilies bursting swift as thought –

i remember he looked over the peaks
to the west elk pass

& said i wish i could
expand

(could be the vast sea of coniferous trees,
could be cloud shadows unfolding)

wide enough to hold mountains in my arms;

& i often think of my father like this
the unconscious poetics of his words
encircling this place as it lay
unrolling home before him

i remember sunwarm juniper
thick in the air it was sticky
& everything was bright
bright bright as tears as the edges
of luminous cloud passing over us
out into the comforting vertigo of space –

ii )

i remember telling my father once
the story i heard
about napi

napi old man grandfather
whose heart is a mountain, belly
that austral river, nose a hill;
elbows reaching out over the arc
of those waterfalls, keeping us from harm –

napi made mountain goats
& bisons, sparrowhawks & hares
& people from the warm mud
& river silt, the living land –

now he waits in the hills,
hand to his forehead
squinting to see us over the rise –

holding us in his soaring gaze,
watery corners of bright glacial eyes –

iii)

when i was small
my father took me hiking
& taught me how to name the
trees & plants:

as we walked i’d learn
about the yarrow, dogwood, wintergreen
harebells, monkshood, reindeer moss,
bedstraw, timothy, tamarack,

we'd play a game;

i’d have to repeat all the names
to him or
we wouldn’t go back to camp.

& my father has brought me here
to these mountains
so many times

i feel now as if i never leave them,
that now my returning is seamless,
like thread woven trailing black mosses,

no break in time sewn
between body & land;

following my trails of wildrose,
wintergreen blue camas glacierlily

he gave me a map here
so much more than any written cartography,

a map in the lines of my palms
spilling over my hands:

this land of ours –

no
we are of the land

iv)

here i feel i’ve spilled
onto this fabric of rock once-liquid solidified,
where memory has inscribed its paths,
striations on the cerebrum, following

each one of my own footsteps,
remembering the scent
of juniper midafternoon

with the waters of the creek all troutglint silver
when i would catch my father
wordlessly in prayer;

remembering the shadows
of the opal range at sunset
slowing eroding luminous edges,
dissolving soul into dusk;

(that blueblackness
of the light-bruised sky)

& the whispering of labyrinthine
lodgepole alveoli down the valley
to the west, breathing arboreal language

from my oldest memory
sings me asleep –

v)

official maps mark these peaks
as mount invincible, mount indefatigable –

two mountains named after british warships
that sunk in the battle of jutland

& i wonder if their old nakoda & cree & siksika names
have perished too, names of the shining
mountains lingering under layers of lichens

turning stone to sand

i wonder if anyone remembers –
my father thinks that even these
names will be forgotten someday. nothing lasts, really;
for these rocks it’s all slow erosion,

the paths running over & over the heart

effluvient: pulmonic echo of a rockfall,
the avalanche tracks traced on our cortex,
those mountains mnemonics memory
bled white in the sun –

& we hike & we travel & then, he says,

his own bones aching with the decay of marrow,
roots reclaiming stone –

we all get tired.

vi)

after napi created the land
he retreated to the mountains, forest
& lay down

for a long nap;

i know someday we’ll all grow weary
& let his rippling river of bowstring pull us in –

i can feel his arrow flying
between ridges of splayed stone ribs rushing
with creek veins & arteries running south to the
sweetgrass hills of his knees it will tether us

catch us, call us home.