Map & Shadow

What is perhaps most truly odd is the peculiar & myopic requirement that someone we love die in order for us to most fully consider the implications of dying at all. Our lives seem delineated by deaths, as all lives are, with only eventual reprieve from its immediacy permitting our days to banner & hang catenary from one obituary to the next. We pivot from immersion in all of death’s details back to our own lives & weigh them anew & wonder how best to recalibrate, to impose new bearings. My own life here a sort of waiting in tow with our compass already set, the days reduced to logistical tinkering & finger-tapping & imagining again through the landscape I so dearly miss. 


We have oscillated regarding how best to position the kids in the world. We tried Montana in hopes that we could abide what sacrifices we sought in ourselves in a kind of exchange for the possibility of more cultural exposure for them. & then every weekend we fled into the mountains, as far from people as we could. Now we know, for a certainty, that without the companionable landscape that permits us to dream, the filament in our living dulls & shudders. I want instead to live fully through my children’s growing, alive & bright in every step. My answers, our answers, will not be theirs, in the end, but we’ve learned the importance of showing them what it means to live through the trials of dreaming & struggle unto the ragged edge of doing, where toil begets joy & the wide world sighs out before you, counterpoised, harmonized. I feel like a ghost here, flitting through days in the shock of death without the context to turn from it with renewed vigor to live. It swells in me, but feels like wading in a shallow lake & waiting for the tide of an ocean. I know that the north will not remedy everything, but it will set me into motion again, animus in my blood, viscera bellowing through. We live, all, in a shadow of death, but I wonder at its edges, where the blackness blurs into light, where its cold adumbrations singe & cinder at the flash & foil of sun. To wander there, & then past, knowing where we’ve come from, knowing where we’ll go. A map shaped by shade & border, but burgeoned & swollen still with all in life that we may possess. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crow Pass Crossing

There was a point there, sliding on my ass down a hundred-yard snowfield rippled with minute waves of ice & buried rock, when I wondered if perhaps I ought to reorient myself in order to avoid slamming into the jagged boulder looming below. & there was a point while loping across another pitch of snow sidelong wherein I noticed I might well slide a mile off course if I didn’t hit the footholds. There was incessant rain, beating down from the report of the starting pistol until the finish line, & a fierce firn wind weaving through the willows, the Devil’s Club, the sedge-green grass. & the feeling on the far shore of Eagle River of wholly numb legs wobbling underneath me. I completely ate shit a half dozen times, tripped & recovered a dozen more, stubbed my twice-broken toe, stepped knee-deep in beaver ponds, slid & slopped through mud, leapt over twenty piles of fresh bear scat & clutched looming thistles to right myself, committing the ensuing mile each tim
Read more

January 20

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at
Read more

Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o
Read more