SPECIAL FEATURE
Joan Naviyuk Kane: New Poems
A Wall Collapsed by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Like light within linen its
movement in a small field.
Harmless and visible,
its brilliance a sheen—
a river swayed out in depth
uncluttered by sediment.
I found a silver way
to the sea. Scree and scission
tighten the ligaments rigged
to the hollow behind my knee—
should I be troubled by the land,
locked, let me know the pass
through which I must travel astray
from the teeth of a storm to light
again upon you.
Little Air by Joan Naviyuk Kane
A tress or tree, one or the other
fell when he blew his breath—
then rain, its wind, came closing in
through a hole in the roof
where humankind would never
be nurtured. I give no opposition
to the sky, I will leave
no stone ring
behind
beyond the outer
walls where my abolished house
once stood, as it stands now,
open to magpies strayed too late
into a thin season, their noise
mistaken for a complicated engine.
Stemmata by Joan Naviyuk Kane
One I will have nothing to do with,
American in all her lineages.
I know what she will say—
find me something frail
in a gloss of day
on the black branches
of the white birches.
She only knows the trees
by the scent of their shoots
thrust from the hot earth—
but I know instead
of other stars in cold
and disappearing places.
The Straits by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Ledum more familiar than Labrador tea,
another alias for rhododendron
in matted growth beneath the most shallow
depth of snow on record in all our winters.
Pausing upbluff from the edge of the ice
I broke from branches leaves to pin between
my teeth and tongue until warmed enough
for their fragrant oil to break and cleanse
you from me. Somewhere in a bank of fog
beyond the visible end of open water, low
rounded hills were alleged windfeathered—
not capillary, nervous or venous in drainages.
In routes along the shore, forever slipping
under, I am reminded—in the city
one finds it simple to conceive nothing,
a system, and nothing but a world of men.
Creve Coeur by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Star
stars, and all other eyes
dead coals no interval
between each finish,
the three, the lost.
It is not my heart
unburned in the ashes,
but another part of me,
one for which the words
have long been lost.
Enclitic by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Hailstones brimmed the valleys while you quarreled on
the mound at the mouth of the river. The rocks rolled
down the slopes toward the sea which had not yet
submerged the land, the road, the plain of game and
lichen. The firmament circled overhead and our grief
became very deep, bottomless. The city shone with
accumulated angers together. Could there be nothing
ahead, nothing behind? Let us make masks with small
holes to account for our privation, no eyes.
Earnings Statement by Joan Naviyuk Kane
She is not
as she used to be,
the bird with the bit in her beak.
Note the void,
not oblivion:
a tightness of mind.
Last season a white spruce
split in strong wind,
its boughs downed
around its stump.
A torn thing
survived by the flushed
fruit of the sour drupe
clustered beneath it.
Cramp bark, viburnum,
misnomer. Catamenia
of curse, recurrence.
A darkblack cloud
above open water
if our weather is apt to vary.
The woman
drifted in deep with words
finds inferior comfort
all over hell,
her ancient region.
Grisaille by Joan Naviyuk Kane
A crucifix deprived of its nails gives counsel
to quit one’s work when night breaks quick
& the snarling of dogs prevails into the north
wind: the land is emptied of birds as they take
wing too late, & like us, become part of a quantity
gnawed away. Let us knock snow from the roof,
make water from ice, brush against the awful noise
of a forefinger split to strips & then sink into sleep
though we have left no land & tomorrow
together, must provide a child with a legend.
Unmercenaries by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Father, you are unwritten
and not sorry. Your own father
unforgiving and felled,
his funeral blooms parched
to flat petals pressed black
in the missal, purchased
and passed down
through a lineage
of near-barren girls
at a dear, dear price.
The boys have seen
your track’s dark wheel
and dire regulation
of trail that recedes
into land unmarked.
You are not fairer,
but fouler, householder,
in your fear of women:
we who earn nothing.
Yours a myth of succession
unbroken, steadfast.
The final stone of the underworld
not a monolith rendered
sacred with red ocher
but a blue bead
I buried to remember
our quarrel, deprivation
at the edge of a sea of milk.
Morganatic by Joan Naviyuk Kane
here I am forever cross
yet you seem to forgive me
though I’d never
devised a day
below the brow
of the ridge
we climbed together
beyond the door
closed to the breath
of afternoon
which after all
is like the sprawl
of our marriage
a more beautiful woman
writes instead
of the odor of brittle maile
the fingers of light
between the palms
she asked for a spectrum full
of blues in growth
& patterns supple
were I you I would renounce
or compose another altogether
for another vigor another verdure
Exhibits from the Dark Museum by Joan Naviyuk Kane
In a shop of bloat and blown glass,
I pry an iridescent green beetle
alive from my ear.
We chase a dwindling trail
paved with dire coins
towards three skulls enclosed
in a box of Olympia beer.
White grass: vitiligo
thrust from the tract
of his scalp, now mine.
Your voice, a sforzando
of light, strikes the rock-ridge
hung above the dwellings. Or,
your voice, a grim
notation of the sweep
between us. All night
along with you
our sons respire.
I fever through memory.
The world
that survives
me is but a dangerous place.
Starvation Episode by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Rifle tobacco tea and cloth
deliver us from this time
when foxes come no longer:
we are vexed with troubles
of love and coalition,
a glut, and what to sustain us?
Metabole by Joan Naviyuk Kane
In song, swamp has another name.
There source countless ways
to say we yet lack snow to sound.
The freshets issue still &
there is no body
at any turn that has found
composure. I would not form
the words with softer syntax:
a bone skewer must close
the bag of broth from a seal
whose body will never know
your ammunition. I lost
my breath in strands that gave
rise to winds, in summer
and another kind of abundance.
Another Pastoral by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Not a flock of birds by any means,
but enough to fill the friable air
with thin song and batter rime
down from branches. They too
are statistic, lucky to be alive, alit
on the chain link fence that divides
us from a wilderness now peculiar.
The tracks of voles or other rodents
discernible between black trunks
gouged by a porcupine that shambles
through from shade to shade in every
season. We have had our mouths
muttered with charcoal, paintballs,
Vitis vinifera— the repeated and rapid
disgraces: let us together find the end
of this and every other settlement.
From the Notebook by Joan Naviyuk Kane
The confused heart of an owl,
a box emptied of everything
but blankets laid in creases,
a worm transformed between
ebb and flow when the houses
were emptied of men; we were
scattered, we scattered
when the stream at its mouth
became muddied from an untold
agitation upslope and in a valley
untrammeled by women. The signal
of your victory in bronze, deduction,
and a seizure of all my lands:
a tremor while I gave birth and then
continued to carry my burden
in the usual way to another island.
Point Transience by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Under winter and below a hill of thin blue clay
the waves were high and rising, water
turning back, folding over and opening
into an ebb more precise than absent—
The hood of his coat a distant bloom
when she began to weep for him,
his sled trace a sulcus hard and frozen in.
For her I sought and gathered wood—
dry willow twigs, a jettisoned mast,
sticks staged for hanging damp packs
of garments to take notice of the wind—
Let us plait our smoke thick into the pitched sky.
Nine Lines Against Dreamless Sleep by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Supplicants, or soul and string: a
battery of trees bound fast,
askance. We stretched the sinew
from tangled roots of coarse grass.
Another time she will reach
the goal she now gives up.
Let her look the father in the face.
The moon would be his head:
it thinks, she thought, for no one.
Another Inlet by Joan Naviyuk Kane
A dog I thought I saw moving in circles
on the sea ice, miles out—
the hour blue, persuasive, brief—
I’d have written about the light
if it wasn’t so cold or unforgiving
in the way it pewtered the branches
of elsewhere spruces blown clear
of snow. Strange the way we learn
to forage, and what for, even longer.
Star, sward, sword. Of a course
I have been mistaken: a soul knocked
open, rift and replenished. Between us,
in looking back it was not dog.
It wasn’t anything.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Iñupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. Her writing awards include an Individual Artist Award from the Rasmuson Foundation, a United States Artists Creative Vision Award, and a Whiting Award for her first book, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (NorthShore Press, 2009 and a second edition, University of Alaska Press, 2012). Her second book, Hyperboreal, received the 2012 Donald Hall Prize and was published in 2013 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Kane is also the recipient of a Connie Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, a National Native Creative Development grant, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, and a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Fellowship. She is the 2014 Indigenous Writer in Residence at the School for Advanced Research and faculty for the Master of Fine Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
“The poems of Joan Naviyuk Kane are lyrical blasts from a far northern landscape of history and myth. . . . Ms. Kane transports us.” The New York Times