June 5, 2012

Rain has been falling here, almost relentless. Stampede was covered in a series of chained, small lakes, & the rivulet that usually peaks as a trickle parallel the road cut a formidable bank a few days back, the water white capped, roiling, overburdening the culverts. The rivers, too, gnash & tumble. Strong brown gods, said Eliot. & in our yard, welcomed to our home amidst the thunder & clamorous downpour, our new friend Zigzag has joined us from up in Akiak in hopes of breeding a litter with Solo. She floated down the Kuskokwim, flew to us from Bethel & drove back north from Anchorage. She’s taken well to the place & runs the bluff free with our other seven dogs, doting on Solo, Kristin tells me, like an infatuated schoolgirl. Free walking the dogs out to the bluff has become one of our favorite things. Littlehead leads every charge, darting in & out of the spruce that lines either side of the trail, emerging suddenly to check in before sprinting off again ahead, reminding us daily that she is in fact the leader of the pack. Diminutive in name, perhaps, but formidable nonetheless. Solo & Kabob meanwhile weave almost as if tied together, nipping at one another’s necks all the while. T-bone alternates between his beautifully smooth trot & his boyish capacity for sudden slapstick, rolling over willows, tumbling into hills, leaping at us with all the force he can muster. & Maximus herding with his cavernous bark, Moose doting intermittently on Kabob or the sound of passing birds, & Willa electing more & more to follow her own itinerary until rejoining us for her famous tundra freak-outs. & the bluff looks out over Upper Panguingue, through a cluster of birch, the slow hillock on the other side curving around beyond sight to our property, where we will live with these same dogs on another bluff one day. & around that corner beyond our ken, so many things that we dream we begin to yoke into being. It’s curious, how a dreaming can find itself populated with such a diaphanous array of details. That sweet, chthonic tundra smell kicking up from the tussocks, or the russet leaves on the groundscrub, the shriveled blueberries. The strained song of the thrush. The thin white line of fur along Kabob’s forehead, or the model stamp on the joist hangers, or the susurrus of the birch-leaves along the bluff. Kristin’s grey-green eyes, or those loose long strands of her red hair taken by the breeze, fluttering like a ribbon against the pale backdrop of the sky. The ridges that articulate our horizon, bathed in the unreal aureate light of this place. I have dreamt before, but in a vocabulary of vagaries, a language composed of abstractions. To find in dreaming a texture, a tangible foundation, seems to me among the finest things I’ve found.

Comments

Unknown said…
So beautiful AP - chthonic! I love that I have to use a dictionary to read my husband's writings.
June 5, 2012 at 12:30 PM
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