dg nanouk okpik

For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to:dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a three-hinged mirror, as a way of seeing shadows of shadows. Milkweed grows on the side of the road in ditches, reminiscent of professors’ soft words, amazing the brilliant contemplation and thought pattern as you learn, slowly. In my body neuron-zipped words and more words. My lexicon building from nothing to something good. Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music. Dots and lines, strands and strings I rest on the note D, increased by one half as my orchestra director signals, dashes and spaces for letters as grace notes in Morse code. Notes in staccato igniting instrumental waves of burning wood, a fiery spark over and speck dust played in harmonics, as a coot hovers over a brook dives in comes back with a fish. No one would ever know its true beauty and calmness, the setting sun across an arctic lake, unless it is witnessed. As speckled day owls, brants, and mergansers float in the sunset. To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual. 11,000 murres with webbed feet land also without any fear of predators. But still, on the page grow spotted mushrooms and morels. Examine the distortion and effects of the warming earth. The change of the ice age with purpose as the warming earth today, but I take heart in sun along with the core of a gingko tree’s light.

She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench. She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup. She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman. She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter or a cavern. She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles of roe and pan reservoir dust from a shelter for the ice worms. Because the earth is molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.

As I       toss & roll these bones at the 2nd,  3rd & 4th vertebra the curvity of my neck where something of  a       winged   fused bowed   & fossilized merged   kink-bended wrongly & fused  bowed & fossilized    then merged bended   slouched    in a hunchbacked   crooked pain    into   a pinged pang    where   needles & cracks at my side-to-side forced   hanging   sluiced movement   of   ivory scalloped   cervixes  at the nape   & snaps   snaps I rebound   at the fear & instinctively   quake with vanquished surrender in numbness   & wake  then mumble   you’re part of me now   leave   & it slaps its tale then    a V formation following & decelerates   the sea waved source   of   vigor  110  years old.

Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind of spikelets biting the air? Dip one. The lips of vanished flames in lava coals glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two. She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three. While still in the embryo, separating the body from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold. Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea, ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.

Taken: “duck foot skin; an owl with five owlets; nesting minks; caught in a fish trap. A bird egg found in winter.”

First:       Brother, remove the tool marks on your scathed skin, brush your tattoos with nettles, smear bearberry juice in the gashes. Crack open the jail-seed. Second:   Tear away the bars which restrain your lean, spare life. Bend your curves in a knot. Brother, smudge your saw-tooth edges. Third:      Cut red seaweed to conceal your gray cadaver; start wetting your skin down; after scraping, drip your bowels of blood, change into wolf. Fourth:    The savannah sparrow flies north. In speech, smell fine-grained hawthorn. Collapse your voice into bark and howl.