You knock on the door but nobody answers. Cupping your hands around your face you peer through the side-panel of frosted glass. A kettle is whistling, a woman singing as she sets the table. This is a familiar house. You knock again. Inside, the sounds are festive. Glasses clink and a band starts up. Pressing your ear to the door, you hear the sound of your own laughter. This is the house you grew up in. You're sure of it now.
i
Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone
surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur
Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,
all islanders do, and I’m in blessed Ann Arbour,
mainland, where I found safe harbour under
green sea of trees now becalmed, frosted.
Ideas of Oracabessa propel me forward
down the straits of Packard, past the Jewel
Heart centre where a wild beat poet is ash
urned behind red doors. I stop and pay
respect due him. Then I’m urgent, in need
Hands pressed to glass
On the fence across from the long-term care home families leave memorials for auntie, kokum, baba
Bismillah is my first memory.
I became a bird in the Qur’an
at hardly eight years old.
I opened the dark green cover
and revealed the slippery
two hearts: Arabic
and its English translation.
On Saturdays, I learned to repeat
passages in Arabic,
to recite the Qur’an
in its truest language—
otherwise are the locusts
really locusts?
I read and read, and yet
A.k.a.
the other gold.
Now that's the stuff,
shredded or melted
or powdered
or canned.
Behold
the pinnacle of man
in a cheeto puff!
Now that's the stuff
absence. displacement.
waiting. then comes rejection.
anger follows. shame makes
the beds
the shadows jostle between
the walls of the scarcely visited cities.
time nips at our heels we are
afraid to arrive last
I love the rain when it
wraps me like a
river. grafts me to the clouds.
I share in the properties
of the sky. I grow
like a tree
A view from two sides of Polaris, it is said:
the living awaits destined relatives to retort.
These people go around waking the sleeping ones
when the weather is good: they wait for those
who-are-coming-around-the-bend.
1981 Anaktuvik Pass/Tulugaq Elijah Kakinya Inupiaq name Kainnaaq said,
I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.
Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of
the voice so dear to me?
I've dreamt of you so often that my arms used to embracing your shadow and
only crossing on my own chest might no longer meet your body's shape.
And before the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled me for days
and years I would doubtless become a shadow.
Oh the shifts of feeling.
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
I say to my audience. There is something smaller I say to myself:
I don't hate nature at all. Places have thoughts — hills have backs that love
being stroked by our eyes. The river gobbles down its tract as a metaphor
but also abt its day. The bluffs purr when we put down blankets at the