YOUR LOVELY FACE
I
The arctic fox slipped into the tamarack woods at Twin Lakes. A thick bushy tail and shy turn of the head was required to become its barrenness. The frozen rain has stuck to its back like darts. It was so cold that I couldn't bleed, fearing that old Nanook would catch my scent. I heard the ice growl beneath the frozen lake. I was nothing to this land but living sustenance, the crumb of a Canada Gray Jay. It's button eye pinpoints the exact location of my lunchbox. Its bold fat breast is facing the north in that tragic courageous way, where big ice crosses rocks with snow and wind. That is from the northern winter, this continual and unstoppable becoming.
II
The ptarmigan shelter on the windswept tundra where there is no resistance, amongst the glazed over and ice edged yellow willow. Their reward is relationship and existence. You look down into the nest of their feathers with sympathy and respect. They are already sheltering there, across the wilderness of a northern summer, in a deadly howling silence, that still grip of ice in its fingers of scant warmth. The great snow bears gallop along the tundra coast by the big shipping yard of Churchill in Manitoba. They are waiting for the grey sub arctic Hudson Bay to freeze over and to send them north onto the ice floats. Many will never return.
III
The curtains of green aurora fall through millions of stars, making a silhouette of conifers in the early hours. What I notice is the bitter depth of the freeze and that everything escapes this world or simply dies. The dazed polar bears begin to stir at minus sixty. The arctic fox is trapped and cries out all night, gnawing through her spirit paw. Suddenly all seems lost now. Then I turn and see your lovely face, retreat into its layered jacket. You know this winter wants our blood and bones. We have come a long way in order to touch it. We are losing heat from the first moment. I fought with all my burning. But you caught me, in the land of no heaven, no hell. The old lunatic wolf, lapping at the frozen carcass of no clear answers in spite of herself. |
