Tuesday, September 16, 2008

abalone.

sea-stars, near juneau, ak, early june 2008


my boot, shiny pebbles in the bay, water-glint, near juneau, ak, also early june '08.


me on the beach, near juneau, ak, june '08

a poem, & gratuitous alaska pictures. so many i haven't posted. eeep.
abalone
(for b.)

once your heart’s been opened,
you’ll never close it again –

not once the crows have
carried you over the bay, a
smashed abalone shell
on the slick black beach-slate:

all your soft slippery creature
is splayed out all over the rocks,
sunlight illuminates the hidden insides,
the shattered shell’s nacre –

rib slivers glint & waves wash
out the bleeding crevasse
so small & shelterless
dissected & now caressed

by every last drop of water
in the world –

Monday, September 15, 2008

stones. feathers. bones. skins.


luminous caragana in the river valley, last wednesday evening






I am reading a very beguiling book of poems right now, by Sky Dancer / Louise Halfe. She's a Cree poet from Saddle Lake, originally, who writes in English, but writes it like it's nêhiyawêwin, Cree. Her syntax is smooth & distinctive & she weaves in the magical cadences of Cree phrases, and calls this mixed language her 'grassroots tongue'.



The new one I am reading is called 'The Crooked Good' & it is rich & dire & beautiful, & you should really go here & read the excerpt. She is a storyteller, & in this cycle of poems (which reads like a novella, almost), she is ê-kwêskit, Turn-Around Woman, haunted by cihcipistikwân, Rolling Head, who is a mother & a lover & a terrible conscience, a guide, & she is retelling her life, her mother's life, her grandmother's life, everyone's life. She plays with time, erases era so that it's all past, all future -- all her relations are alive. & she writes of this country here, & her words are like rose-hips & the little white shoots of grass, you can taste the geography of eastern Alberta so well.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

to all the places that i have known.

berry-picking, september 2007, near the summit of tthe may, near kwanlin (whitehorse)

slopes of tthe may, looking over the täga shäw (yukon river) to täghur män (marsh lake), september 2007
I'm done my Masters thesis. (When I say 'done', though, I just mean the writing part, not all the defending & whatnot... & besides, it still needs a rather thorough edit, as I'm sure I left some sentences rambling on to nowhere or falling off cliffs or something) But anyway, I am basically finished. 49, 538 words to sum up 4 months of fieldwork and a whole year of thinking... & this leaves me with very little to say right now.

On top of the mental tiredness, & brainfuzz left from three days of pretty much writing straight through, I am left with such a strange sadness & such nostalgia. It was just a year ago Friday when I headed up to Whitehorse for the first time to start my research, & it was autumn & that weekend I picked itl'ät & jenächür zhür, lowbush cranberries & crowberries, on Tthe May, Grey Mountain & saw the land unrolling coppery before me. (see above) & I had just started. Just started my first anthropological fieldwork & I was terribly anxious & terribly hopeful. I barely knew what I was doing, but eventually things happened & everything unrolled & swept me away & then I wrote 150-something pages about it.

& it's not that I'm finished now. What I learned, the experiences I opened myself up to having -- these things will continue to inspire & inform my future research. I'm just finished this year, this massive project that devoured my head for awhile.

The friends I met there, who helped me so much, who were so kind & gave so much of themselves, I miss them tremendously... & I just hope that what I wrote something with integrity, something that does some justice to the people I worked with. I hope when they read it, they find something illuminating they didn't consider before about the dynamics of their language situation. I just hope they see the hopefulness, the vibrancy that I saw.

I am so grateful to the people I worked with that it makes my heart hurt with that inchoate little choking, like I swallowed a rose hip whole & now they write me, they say, the berries are coming out, when are you coming back?

& it's hard, because oh, I wish I could go now! Go roaming the lava-red lichen slopes, go to the school & listen to the kids sing in Southern Tutchone... It won't be for awhile yet. The berry bushes will be under a few metres of snow by then. I hope they put save some in the freezer for me...

* * *

Have a song. It's a good song for driving on the Alaska Highway between Haines Junction & Whitehorse. I know that road well.

Ed is a portal (mp3) -- Akron/Family (Love is Simple)

(I have no idea why Ed is a portal. But I do enjoy the lines:

To all of the places that I have known [repeat, etc]

Now that my body's grown the lonely heart poetry
Droning in hearts becomes songs that all objects
Sing to each other like friends telling stories

It's all the same story)