letter to a friend in greenland

moss-hairs on a log in the river valley, early may 2008

This next little poem bit I wrote a while ago. It's a response to/was inspired by this poem by Oksana Zabuzhko, 'Letter from the Summer House'. I remember my mom telling me that when she went to the Ukrainian museum in Chicago last year, there was a display about Chornobyl that made striking use of these words.

A friend and I had been talking then about an English course where you write poems to a poet (in response to their work), experiment with the reverberations of the words... and I wanted to experiment with this, just to see... Anyway, Zabuzhko's poem was nibbling at my brain, and I was thinking about a friend from Greenland & the melty North & the ducks that fell in the oil, puddle universes & spiderweb-connections, & running in the snowstorms of late April, etc. I just feel haunted, sometimes, by the intrinsic connections exposed by disastrous or extraordinary happenings, make me think of the Gaia hypothesis, how they bring the distant near.

Anyway, I don't know about a lot of it, haven't edited much, but it is something, for now.

letter to a friend in greenland

dear _____________,

there’s been another summer snowstorm, here.
may’s new leaves, grassy month stunned
by the sudden tornado-ing of snow.
spiders & their frozen silks dead on the doorstep.
in my garden, the twining clematis
shadows twist up the stucco, their
brittle hairs shaped by the ache of frost.

friends in inuvik said they’ve seen
polar bears wandering down the dempster
this year, there’s nothing for them at the edge
of the floes. tourists mistake them for
furry SUVs, chasing confused caribou
up past tsiigehtchic.
no one knows where they’ll go.

i don’t know. maybe it’s like erika said:
we live as fleas on the back of this
great green doe & she’s just scratching us,
trying to shake us, gain her balance
as she picks about the lichens, all we do
is suck her dry in the summer heat,
itch & etch herself into her soft skins

& lay ourselves a clutch of eggs, never sated.
where i am, people are discontented
nestlings, spending their breath
squawking about the price of oil.
a blizzard comes, five hundred ducks
go down over the tar sands. immense
dark waters a false harbour where the

trees ebb and fall, boreal tide gone out
silent into a sticky black lake. walking
along the cracked sidewalks of the city,
cars splashing past; everything is much
closer than it appears. the world turns
to meltwater puddling over the sidewalks
& alleys, but a drought dries up our cells,

twitching with ache half a world away.
crops fail, & i think sometimes i feel it in my cells,
earthquaking its way along the human
fault line. i’ve been thinking of you, worrying
about your own epicentre on that
melting, fishless coast. will you

write soon, have you had to leave to nuuk for work?

this morning i found a frozen
spider’s web, illuminated in the ice, stretching
beyond the telephone wires, the clinking metal
of my fence, its silvery nets – that great doe scrapes away
at the soggy permafrost, under a may snowstorm,
& the wind that twists in the twining clematis
is the same air that’s a cyclone somewhere –