☀ What Sparks Poetry: Bret Shepard on "Here But Elsewhere"

Already sick, I waited for the doctor. Two
months later the appointment was canceled

as storm prevented flights into Atqasuk.
We build us alone. The solitary fox empties

the house of its many things. Days count
pills to pollute their bodies like ice warms

to its desires. Quiet deaths, these glaciers.
All the erratics, a kettle lake warms to boil.

*

Sedge edges the village, spreads. Dominant

brings to mind curved landscapes—a city
against the foothills, ocean to shore—even

tundra where tussocks seek enough height

to flower. Even with that there are eyes
reaching. This landscape appears beyond

human shape. Even without that, names
mapped it, those eyes running horizons.

-40 degrees—to touch each other is arrival.

*

Thirty-third spring. Painted tundra fills
the time. It looks like a scene we might find

in the open room beyond this room, far past
ourselves—a parade of caribou eyes aimed.

*

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.

Christian’s mother died when a rope
broke as she helped pull the bowhead

onto the beach, its recoil force enough

to kill what it hit the moment it did.
Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

*

On this street or that one, on Fireweed
or Tudor, maybe downtown Anchorage,

their blocks on my breath, if I see a story
repeat a gesture and fall, maybe like Jonah

would have years ago, winter on his face,
will it return as pores release in the night?

*

As we tilted our cold necks to the floor

one friend stood behind and pushed
hard on the back of our heads to make us

black out. We tried to turn off, inhaling

days with every drug hidden in school
to leave ourselves and return metaphors.