Peggy Shumaker

Not one star, not even the half moon on the night you were born Not the flash of salmon nor ridges on blue snow Not the flicker of raven’s never-still eye Not breath frozen in fine hairs beading the bull moose’s nostril Not one hand under flannel warming before reaching Not burbot at home under Tanana ice not burbot pulled up into failing light Not the knife blade honed, not the leather sheath Not raw bawling in the dog yard when the musher barks gee Not the gnawed ends of wrist-thick sticks mounded over beaver dens Not solar flares scouring the earth over China Not rime crystals bearding a sleek cheek of snow Not six minutes more of darkness each day Not air water food words touch Not art Not anything we expect Not anything we expect to keep Not anything we expect to keep us alive Not the center of the sea Not the birthplace of the waves Not the compass too close to true north to guide us Then with no warning flukes of three orcas rise, arc clear of sea water

Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her house, crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the hard belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.

Hair rush, low swoop— so those of us stuck here on earth know—you must be gods. Or friends of gods, granted chances to push off into sky, granted chances to hear so well your own voice bounced back to you maps the night. Each hinge in your wing’s an act of creation. Each insect you snick out of air a witness. You transform obstacles into sounds, then dodge them.

Plankton rise toward the full moon spread thin on Wakaya’s surface. Manta rays’ great curls of jaw scoop backward somersaults of ocean in through painted caves of their mouths, out through sliced gills. Red sea fans pulse. The leopard shark lounges on a smooth ramp of sand, skin jeweled with small hangers-on. Pyramid fish point the way to the surface. Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough, their mouths neon cautions. Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm. Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands of mouths held open to night. Currents’ communion—giant clams slam shut wavy jaws, send shivers of water. Christmas tree worms snap back, flat spirals tight, living petroglyphs against the night.

When we got close enough we could hear rivers inside the ice heaving splits the groaning of a ledge about to calve. Strewn in the moraine fresh moose sign— tawny oblong pellets breaking up sharp black shale. In one breath ice and air— history, the record of breaking— prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break out from under four stories of bone-crushing turquoise retreating.