A Walrus Tusk from Alaska

Arp might have done a version in white marble, the model held aloft, in approximate awe: this tough cross-section oval of tusk, dense and cool as fossil cranium— preliminary bloodshed condonable if Inupiat hunters on King Island may follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky, echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater. Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so? Netted incisions black as an etching saw a way to scratch in living infinitives known since the Miocene to have animated the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump, and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc, salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... Farther along the bone conveyor belt a small ringed seal will never not be swimming, part-time landlubber, who may feel overshadowed by the donor walrus ahead. And by his scribal tusk, which stands in direct correspondence to the draftsman’s burin, skillful enough to score their tapeloop ostinato, no harp sonata, but, instead, the humpback whale’s yearning bassoon (still audible if you cup the keepsake to your ear and let it sound the depths).