For Fatima Louay Rafiq Al-Sultan, Age 0

 

No matter where I would

Find you, the here of it always

Declares itself. Would it have been

That way for you? The robins

Blaring unabashed, the juncos 

Spread like black seed across the

Pebbled path. Smell of dew

Like taste of water. We travel

Now to death to clarify what is yet

Alive, knock upon its door. 

The lily pads in the cove against

The sheen of ancient cliff. Itself

Divulging histories– rock slipping from 

Rock, bone from bone. Three otters

Skiffle to water, leaving fine tenebrous

Track. The world as it was. I

Bring you here, swaddled in muslin. 

Your name, too, divulging histories.

Ya Fatima, is it anything at all

To ask you now to some peace? 

Sunlight in multifurcate columns

Clustered by angular cloud. Somewhere

Behind all of its light, stars, moons,

Galaxies, something close to infinity. 

& here my dog curls & snores. Here, 

A Swainson’s thrush knells & I hear

Morning & morning & morning. 

The dwarf birches stretch, wild roses

Open in the light. I do not know

Why anyone was permitted to 

Bury you in broken buildings. The

World so unbearably beautiful

If we are permitted its witness. 

& only if. I sing your name.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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, a...
Read more

A Bit More From Bettles

  We have walked upon the taut & shifting crest of the wave, as from some far sea, compass-lost, the din of ocean-swell underfoot & the brocade of stars flung in reflection from trough back to sky. The horizon was a muted thing, a blur between grey & grey, flashing matte color like a starling in shade. One thinks of life as wanting, as tending toward rest, as if once unburdened of the velocities that buoy & compel us, its roots would writhe into Reason & its flowering would pull in the scented breath of the world. I have wondered at this, & been given cause to often. I tumble as much through space as I do through time. We are given to understand them both as linear, but they grow to enwreathe me, a kind of bird’s nest wherein the bend of having been sits across the diameter & sees itself grown longer, run wild, tucked between past & future. I think about ending up here, in Alaska again, in this town of twenty or so that felt instantaneously familiar....
Read more