Writers’ Weir: Poem in Cedar Wood

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, October 12, 2016

I brushed away wood chips, brought your face

From the soft yellow cedar wood. Solitary atop the totem,

I searched the cross channel, squinting into the fog

Trying to see you sailing deep into the passing years.

I climbed through the mist, up the high glacier trail

Then chiseled your figure into the clear blue ice,

You, who had pushed on in night below the aurora

Toward some distant and lonely roadhouse light.

With riverbank mud, I scrubbed you onto my canvas

Pallet knifed thick with tragic leaf matter and rock,

Current cutting a deep and broad ravine into heart tundra,

Eating away my banks, exposing my tangled alder roots.

Then ebbing and flowing in kelp and soapy surf foam

You strewing the beach as seaweed and bird feathers

Your face among the clouds in tidal pool reflections

Before I called out for you with the cry of the gulls.

You have become the bear’s paw print in muskeg

And I, the jagged black spruce, torn by Arctic winds,

You, cobalt footprints in winter twilight’s violet snow,

I, wind crusted, frozen down hard into a sunless fjord.

Once on a sunlit eve, I stitched a blueberry lining

From a solstice sky rinsed clean with June rain

For a birch bark basket of longing, pulled square, stitched

Tight with strips cut from the hope of an Equinox melt.

Atop the summer sailboat mast above the vibrant harbor,

I stretch my black wings for the afternoon sun. Closing my eyes I hear

New green bear grass growing thick along the creek drainage.

And above, your lost love, floating as a slow summer cloud.

• P.M. David has been a writer and a resident of Alaska since 1979 and Auke Bay since 2009.