Donald Shephard
And Water Rises
and water rises from vast Pacific
escapes six sisters evades seven seas
damp evaporates from breath-cleansing trees
red-poppied farm fields, coiled hummingbird tongues
from alpine meadows life's water rises
before condensing in rarefied air
ibex slake parched lips at mountain snow-fringe
quick trickles trill forth crashing on granite
cascade fume falling to glacial vales
waterworks sculpture rough rock pebble-round
born crystal ice-pure unsullied by time
given flight in youth whitewater runs wild
in stout middle age our river broadens
its power drained by feeder confluence
in doddered dotage slow, meandering
varicose plains pulse current with tides
mouth surges, merges with ocean's wet womb
glorious sun warms and water rises
We Walked Our Love to Point Cabrillo Light
We walked our love to Point Cabrillo Light,
Embraced keen Oystercatcher's joyous space,
Pacific breeze-capped ocean brine delight,
Whale spout up-steamed, and sky befogged a trace.
Ascending through Christina's World we found
Savannah Sparrows honored Wyeth's grass
And Swainson’s Thrush sang madrigal-sweet sound
While hawks exchanged midair a gopher pass.
Observing nature's palette-colored awe
Inspired our lives 'til tramping time declared
That death-knell's hollow pound upon our door
Cast soulless spouse adrift, and though we dared
To dream eternal dreams together chained,
You slipped our rocky shore, your love remained.
Blue
Once, you equaled my size,
two hundred pounds, incomplete
in your cows womb, swimming
to Magdelena Bay, Sea of Cortez,
where three tons sloshed into warm waters.
Linnaeus called you Balaenoptera,
the winged-whale. Your fin-wings,
like my hands, sans opposable thumb.
Your digits now numbering four,
tetradactyl to my pentadactyl.
You weighed two hundred tons.
One hundred long feet long,
displacing the weight of two
thousand men my size. You
lived a man's lifespan.
Salts called you sulphur-bottom
from diatoms coloring your skin,
like bullies calling you yellow-belly.
Your steam-like spout hailed whalers
to titanic tea parties where
they betrayed you, they betrayed you.
We killed blues once en masse.
We killed you the other day
when you surfaced to breathe
above the waves and a propeller
sliced your spine: twice sliced your spine.
We called you Blue, your dead
eyes mirrored my head size.
We interred your skeleton and
winged-fin hand in compost
to exhume for tourist views.
Dermestid beetles, one-millionth
your size, hone your bones.
Coliform bacteria, one-billionth
your size, digest flesh from
four-fingered, blue-boned fins.
For you, Blue, no more calves
weighing three tons, measuring
fin-to-fluke twenty-three feet.
Once, I equaled your size,
two thousand times my own,
the day I first held my son.
Monks Wood
At twelve years old, I roamed through history
Headed with my brother for Ambersbury
Iron Age Hill Fort. We scuffed our sandals
As monks had, scouring a rut along the Green Ride
To Golding's Hill in Epping Forest, Essex, England.
We skirted furze, Thomas Hardy's reddleman fuel,
On Coply Plain and jam-jarred tapioca frog's spawn
From Jack's Hill Bog. I straddled Tippa Burn's banks
To aid brother across the brook. All for the unmitigated joy
Of stepping on the dapple-lit softness of Cushion Moss.
White-spotted, tawny fallow deer, their palmate antlers erect,
Morphed into bracken-shadow silence. Mouths agape,
We gawked through light-stippled hornbeam leaves
To glimpse a tuft-eared, acorn-pouched red squirrel
Cede tree-top drey sites to its American grey cousin.
By family tradition, we replaced a copper penny
Buried in the bole-well of a coppiced beech.
We grappled gnarled branches where, half a thousand
Years earlier, peasants lopped their firewood
Above the heads of lowing, cud-chewing kine.
A pollard among the coppards held the talisman
Rendered smooth and shiny by rain and deadwood
In its humic acid basin. Old coin odor burned
Metallic in my nose, an acrid, foreboding augury.
Cleaned, the token smelt of rotting leaves and punk.
We lay side by side, as brothers will, and heard a wren scold
A viper for stealing eggs, incessant as a harridan shrew,
Like mother berating father for insufficient funds
To shelter, clothe and feed a four-childrened family.
They only argued about money; about farthings,
Halfpennies, threepences, tanners, shillings and florins.
We agreed, my brother and I, that as first-born son
I must find a job. So, at twelve, I became a printer's devil
And drifted away from ghosts of Waltham Abbey monks
And specters of toiling serfs, through history into commerce.
Monks Wood
At twelve years old, Timothy's household chores included every task performed higher than tiptoe. His father unstable, his mother too large, his sisters too afraid, and his brother too young, Timothy climbed alone. Left foot balanced on the banister over the stairwell and right foot atop his parent's bedroom lentil, he eased open the attic entry panel and shimmied away from his troubled family. Inside his raftered sanctuary, he poured over archeological maps of Epping Forest, a green finger penetrating London's smoky East End while, inches away, rain pattered on roof tiles. He planned to trek with his brother to Monk's Wood with its carpet of cushion moss. Timothy smiled remembering the soft pads beneath his feet.
When summer holidays began, Timothy led Stuart to the Iron Age hill fort at Ambersbury, where they searched without success for embankments, knowing serfs had labored to fortify this area for their king. Standing on a low mound, Timothy had the sense they mimicked Lilliputians standing on Gulliver.
They scuffed their sandals, as monks had, along the Green Ride to Goldings Hill pond. Stuart dallied, shuffling his feet to bulldoze dried leaves into piles around a Royal Oak tree constructing his own fort.
Furze, Thomas Hardy's reddleman fuel, proved an impenetrable barrier. Timothy found a way around it and led his brother on to Coply Plain where they scooped tapioca-like frog's spawn from Jack's Hill Bog into a pickle jar. At the steep sides of Tippa Burn, Timothy straddled the banks to help Stuart across the brook. All for the unmitigated joy of stepping on the dapple-lit softness of cushion moss in Monks Wood.
White-spotted fallow deer, antlers erect, morphed into bracken-shadow silence as the boys approached. Mouths agape, they gawked through light-stippled hornbeam leaves to glimpse a red squirrel with its acorn-stuffed pouches. The English red squirrel ceded a prime drey site to its American grey cousin.
On every visit to Monks Wood, their family replaced a copper penny hidden in the bowl of a coppiced beech with another old penny. Timothy regarded the emergent shiny coin as a talisman of family security. Throughout history, villagers had lopped firewood from these trees at intervals of eight to ten years, rendering them pollards. Generations ran cattle among these coppiced trunks. Timothy found the family treasury tree and clambered up. Where they had removed branches, new limbs grew vertically, creating a central bowl which collected rainwater, leaves, and beech nuts forming a humic acid basin. Timothy dredged through the stinky decomposition until he sensed metal. Old coin odor burned acrid in his nose. He inhaled a metallic aroma, an augury of the smell of fear when their father lost his temper spanking Stuart. He waved the copper penny at his brother.
"Here, catch." The coin bounced on Stuart's arm and fell among dry leaves.
"Oops."
"You search for it and when I've hidden the new penny, I'll help you."
They scratched around in the leaf mold beneath the tree. Stuart made a pile of the debris and blew it up. "Pow. Pow. Pow."
His older brother searched on. "Here it is again." Timothy smelled the rotting leaves and punk of the token. "Here, rub it on your trousers to shine it."
Stuart polished it on the side of his short pants. Smooth and shiny, the talisman struck them as worth more than four farthings. They had found a treasure.
They sprawled side by side, as brothers will, and heard a wren scold a viper for stealing eggs. The bird, incessant as a harridan shrew, reminded Timothy of mother berating father for insufficient funds to shelter, clothe, and feed a family of four children. They only argued about money, about farthings, threepenny bits, shillings, florins and half-crowns.
"I shall have to find a job." Timothy told his brother, who busied himself steering a stag beetle over an obstacle course of twigs.
"I shall ask Holy Joe, my scoutmaster, to help me find work." Timothy guided the beetle onto a leaf and upended it.
Stuart pointed. "Look at his legs go."
"Six legs. Insects have six legs you know."
"Oh, one, two, three, four, five, six. Yes, they do."
They followed the course of Staples Brook homeward, without the jam jar of frog's spawn that remained forgotten between tussocks of cushion moss. At teatime, Timothy kept silent about his plan.
Holy Joe found Timothy a position as a printer's devil for four hours on Saturday mornings, a job paying half-a-crown, five times his allowance. He drifted away from ghosts of Waltham Abbey monks and specters of toiling serfs, through history into commerce.
Polka Dot Snow
Parr and Etu sledded up the coast from the village to hunt seal. The sun dipped to the horizon as she gathered precious driftwood for future use and he crept up behind her covered in the polar bear skin. She shrieked and ran across the endless whiteness, knowing he chased her, knowing he would catch her, wanting to be caught. She ran over a hill to a hollow with a lake, aqua colored frozen water at its center and reflections of the bright blue sky in a ring edged by ice. Braids flapped across her back each time she glanced over her shoulder to see him loping along behind. She fell into dry snow crystals, pukak, he straddled her and held her wrists wide above her head.
“What do you want?” She felt the sharp, cold air in her lungs and another deeper pang. He cocooned them in the bear skin and she pulled her braids apart, freeing her hair.
“What do you want?” she asked again.
“Etu,” he whispered.
She raised her hips to thrust against him. She knew she would not stop him this time; that she was ready; that she wanted him; that it was right. He loosened her tunic and she felt his warm leathery hands gentle against her breasts. They raced to open the seal and caribou skins that held in their precious body heat. He bent and kissed the wedge of her fur and entered her most enchanting, most powerful place with urgent homage.
She grabbed his shoulders, pulled her head up and with mouth and eyes wide open, surged against him. He burst through the final obstacle and Etu felt red flash from a spot in the sky over the base of his spine welding them together. She gasped air deeper into her lungs, hugged him to her, willed the red pain away, and replaced it with joy. The cold melted, the snow glowed and spasms rose within her. She crimped her eyes shut, translucent lights danced in her brain, and she heard children’s voices chant in the air, the sound of candle ice dismantling on the lake.
The world around Etu dimmed as night fell, the sounds faded and euphoria set in, she opened her eyes to a sudden brightness resolving into a transparent aural curtain. The new lovers gazed at a tremulous evanescence of meadow green with a blue stream through it, a silk curtain rippling down in the night air. A high singing breeze blew a long banner of pale white-green and pink-rose that unfurled in lateral movements. A golden-yellow glow embossed the white-clad mountains.
He lay still within her until she pushed him gently on his biceps to signal her desire to ease her breathing. He pulled his weight from her and covered her again with fur and seal skin. She smiled quizzically as she noticed the spot of red foam on him; reached for a handful of saturated snow, masak, and cleansed him before she threw the redness out of their bearskin nest. With the care of a novitiate she arranged his furs and seal skin about him.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like the chief of all polar bears. And how are you? Any pain?”
“It is as if this body sleeps and only the eyes and brain are awake, as if body and spirit changed places, swift and slow turn to their contraries. You have tickled the brain, the spirit of this girl.”
“Yes, two brains do this,” and he lifted his hands out of the bearskin, wiggled his intertwined fingers against the curtain of light.
She braided her hair and they rose together. He draped the polar bear skin around them as they rotated to take in the ever changing, multicolored hemisphere. Parr told her that Giant Spirits in the sky played a great game of kickball to cause this spectacular light show and that she must whistle, blow on her fingers, to let the Spirits know she watched the game. They laughed into each others eyes as owners of a mutual secret at the one red spot that stayed true, while the rest of the snow reflected the incandescent, celestial show.
She wiped the blood from her beloved's face with a scrap of white fox fur and tucked it into her sleeve. Mother and son dressed Parr's body in his best clothes, wrapped him in a caribou skin, and the men carried him to the boat. Italoo gathered his father’s weapons, his immaculately sharp spear perfect in its straightness from ivory tip to carved end; his well-worn bow and caribou-decorated quiver of arrows; his atlatl smoothed to the shape of his forearm; his fish trident with its precious copper barbs; his beautifully carved fishing lures with eyes of stone; and, his nanurak to kneel on in the great hunting ground in the afterlife.
Sleet blew sideways into their faces as women of the village paddled the umiak through the steel grey sea and men surrounded the whaling boat in their kayaks. They moved her husband to the burial grounds to lay him on the rock where Italoo set his father’s hunting gear within easy reach. They each placed a rock on him until they entombed the hunter and his implements. She removed the blood-stained scrap of fur from her sleeve and laid it on Parr’s cairn, a single red spot on the snow-covered tundra.
They headed back to the village, the sleet gone and the wind behind them. She sat in the stern of the umiak, covered by her ancient polar bear rug now hairless and black and she smelled his death there. A scent-memory tickled her mind from the first time he had wrapped her in the rug. Her delicate smile befuddled the other mourners in the boat. Etu alone saw another red spot in the snows of long ago. She heard a drum-song thrum through her.
Inyaiya-ya-ya
Parr drum
Drum Parr
Parr drum
Inyaiya-ya-ya
The villagers propelled her along the shore as she wondered what the surrounding snowfields would look like if she had produced a speck of red foam everytime they made love. She thought red spotted snow would surround the camp sites of the Amarakmiut, the Oogoorukmiut and the Tornarssukiut; spread over the caribou hunting grounds; continue along the shore where they sheltered from storms under this same umiak; certainly over the polar bear skin; and once, when they expected to die, on an ice floe that drifted out to sea and mysteriously back again.
She peered across the water to the burial ground to picture him in his grave in the center of a red spotted landscape of snow. The Night-sky Spirits rustled through her brain and colored the world with irridescent flashes of blue, green, red and purple. The pure high voices sang above her again, while the others heard the roar of the sea and dwelt in the various shades of grey and endless, endless white.
and water rises from vast Pacific
escapes six sisters evades seven seas
damp evaporates from breath-cleansing trees
red-poppied farm fields, coiled hummingbird tongues
from alpine meadows life's water rises
before condensing in rarefied air
ibex slake parched lips at mountain snow-fringe
quick trickles trill forth crashing on granite
cascade fume falling to glacial vales
waterworks sculpture rough rock pebble-round
born crystal ice-pure unsullied by time
given flight in youth whitewater runs wild
in stout middle age our river broadens
its power drained by feeder confluence
in doddered dotage slow, meandering
varicose plains pulse current with tides
mouth surges, merges with ocean's wet womb
glorious sun warms and water rises
We Walked Our Love to Point Cabrillo Light
We walked our love to Point Cabrillo Light,
Embraced keen Oystercatcher's joyous space,
Pacific breeze-capped ocean brine delight,
Whale spout up-steamed, and sky befogged a trace.
Ascending through Christina's World we found
Savannah Sparrows honored Wyeth's grass
And Swainson’s Thrush sang madrigal-sweet sound
While hawks exchanged midair a gopher pass.
Observing nature's palette-colored awe
Inspired our lives 'til tramping time declared
That death-knell's hollow pound upon our door
Cast soulless spouse adrift, and though we dared
To dream eternal dreams together chained,
You slipped our rocky shore, your love remained.
Blue
Once, you equaled my size,
two hundred pounds, incomplete
in your cows womb, swimming
to Magdelena Bay, Sea of Cortez,
where three tons sloshed into warm waters.
Linnaeus called you Balaenoptera,
the winged-whale. Your fin-wings,
like my hands, sans opposable thumb.
Your digits now numbering four,
tetradactyl to my pentadactyl.
You weighed two hundred tons.
One hundred long feet long,
displacing the weight of two
thousand men my size. You
lived a man's lifespan.
Salts called you sulphur-bottom
from diatoms coloring your skin,
like bullies calling you yellow-belly.
Your steam-like spout hailed whalers
to titanic tea parties where
they betrayed you, they betrayed you.
We killed blues once en masse.
We killed you the other day
when you surfaced to breathe
above the waves and a propeller
sliced your spine: twice sliced your spine.
We called you Blue, your dead
eyes mirrored my head size.
We interred your skeleton and
winged-fin hand in compost
to exhume for tourist views.
Dermestid beetles, one-millionth
your size, hone your bones.
Coliform bacteria, one-billionth
your size, digest flesh from
four-fingered, blue-boned fins.
For you, Blue, no more calves
weighing three tons, measuring
fin-to-fluke twenty-three feet.
Once, I equaled your size,
two thousand times my own,
the day I first held my son.
Monks Wood
At twelve years old, I roamed through history
Headed with my brother for Ambersbury
Iron Age Hill Fort. We scuffed our sandals
As monks had, scouring a rut along the Green Ride
To Golding's Hill in Epping Forest, Essex, England.
We skirted furze, Thomas Hardy's reddleman fuel,
On Coply Plain and jam-jarred tapioca frog's spawn
From Jack's Hill Bog. I straddled Tippa Burn's banks
To aid brother across the brook. All for the unmitigated joy
Of stepping on the dapple-lit softness of Cushion Moss.
White-spotted, tawny fallow deer, their palmate antlers erect,
Morphed into bracken-shadow silence. Mouths agape,
We gawked through light-stippled hornbeam leaves
To glimpse a tuft-eared, acorn-pouched red squirrel
Cede tree-top drey sites to its American grey cousin.
By family tradition, we replaced a copper penny
Buried in the bole-well of a coppiced beech.
We grappled gnarled branches where, half a thousand
Years earlier, peasants lopped their firewood
Above the heads of lowing, cud-chewing kine.
A pollard among the coppards held the talisman
Rendered smooth and shiny by rain and deadwood
In its humic acid basin. Old coin odor burned
Metallic in my nose, an acrid, foreboding augury.
Cleaned, the token smelt of rotting leaves and punk.
We lay side by side, as brothers will, and heard a wren scold
A viper for stealing eggs, incessant as a harridan shrew,
Like mother berating father for insufficient funds
To shelter, clothe and feed a four-childrened family.
They only argued about money; about farthings,
Halfpennies, threepences, tanners, shillings and florins.
We agreed, my brother and I, that as first-born son
I must find a job. So, at twelve, I became a printer's devil
And drifted away from ghosts of Waltham Abbey monks
And specters of toiling serfs, through history into commerce.
Monks Wood
At twelve years old, Timothy's household chores included every task performed higher than tiptoe. His father unstable, his mother too large, his sisters too afraid, and his brother too young, Timothy climbed alone. Left foot balanced on the banister over the stairwell and right foot atop his parent's bedroom lentil, he eased open the attic entry panel and shimmied away from his troubled family. Inside his raftered sanctuary, he poured over archeological maps of Epping Forest, a green finger penetrating London's smoky East End while, inches away, rain pattered on roof tiles. He planned to trek with his brother to Monk's Wood with its carpet of cushion moss. Timothy smiled remembering the soft pads beneath his feet.
When summer holidays began, Timothy led Stuart to the Iron Age hill fort at Ambersbury, where they searched without success for embankments, knowing serfs had labored to fortify this area for their king. Standing on a low mound, Timothy had the sense they mimicked Lilliputians standing on Gulliver.
They scuffed their sandals, as monks had, along the Green Ride to Goldings Hill pond. Stuart dallied, shuffling his feet to bulldoze dried leaves into piles around a Royal Oak tree constructing his own fort.
Furze, Thomas Hardy's reddleman fuel, proved an impenetrable barrier. Timothy found a way around it and led his brother on to Coply Plain where they scooped tapioca-like frog's spawn from Jack's Hill Bog into a pickle jar. At the steep sides of Tippa Burn, Timothy straddled the banks to help Stuart across the brook. All for the unmitigated joy of stepping on the dapple-lit softness of cushion moss in Monks Wood.
White-spotted fallow deer, antlers erect, morphed into bracken-shadow silence as the boys approached. Mouths agape, they gawked through light-stippled hornbeam leaves to glimpse a red squirrel with its acorn-stuffed pouches. The English red squirrel ceded a prime drey site to its American grey cousin.
On every visit to Monks Wood, their family replaced a copper penny hidden in the bowl of a coppiced beech with another old penny. Timothy regarded the emergent shiny coin as a talisman of family security. Throughout history, villagers had lopped firewood from these trees at intervals of eight to ten years, rendering them pollards. Generations ran cattle among these coppiced trunks. Timothy found the family treasury tree and clambered up. Where they had removed branches, new limbs grew vertically, creating a central bowl which collected rainwater, leaves, and beech nuts forming a humic acid basin. Timothy dredged through the stinky decomposition until he sensed metal. Old coin odor burned acrid in his nose. He inhaled a metallic aroma, an augury of the smell of fear when their father lost his temper spanking Stuart. He waved the copper penny at his brother.
"Here, catch." The coin bounced on Stuart's arm and fell among dry leaves.
"Oops."
"You search for it and when I've hidden the new penny, I'll help you."
They scratched around in the leaf mold beneath the tree. Stuart made a pile of the debris and blew it up. "Pow. Pow. Pow."
His older brother searched on. "Here it is again." Timothy smelled the rotting leaves and punk of the token. "Here, rub it on your trousers to shine it."
Stuart polished it on the side of his short pants. Smooth and shiny, the talisman struck them as worth more than four farthings. They had found a treasure.
They sprawled side by side, as brothers will, and heard a wren scold a viper for stealing eggs. The bird, incessant as a harridan shrew, reminded Timothy of mother berating father for insufficient funds to shelter, clothe, and feed a family of four children. They only argued about money, about farthings, threepenny bits, shillings, florins and half-crowns.
"I shall have to find a job." Timothy told his brother, who busied himself steering a stag beetle over an obstacle course of twigs.
"I shall ask Holy Joe, my scoutmaster, to help me find work." Timothy guided the beetle onto a leaf and upended it.
Stuart pointed. "Look at his legs go."
"Six legs. Insects have six legs you know."
"Oh, one, two, three, four, five, six. Yes, they do."
They followed the course of Staples Brook homeward, without the jam jar of frog's spawn that remained forgotten between tussocks of cushion moss. At teatime, Timothy kept silent about his plan.
Holy Joe found Timothy a position as a printer's devil for four hours on Saturday mornings, a job paying half-a-crown, five times his allowance. He drifted away from ghosts of Waltham Abbey monks and specters of toiling serfs, through history into commerce.
Polka Dot Snow
Parr and Etu sledded up the coast from the village to hunt seal. The sun dipped to the horizon as she gathered precious driftwood for future use and he crept up behind her covered in the polar bear skin. She shrieked and ran across the endless whiteness, knowing he chased her, knowing he would catch her, wanting to be caught. She ran over a hill to a hollow with a lake, aqua colored frozen water at its center and reflections of the bright blue sky in a ring edged by ice. Braids flapped across her back each time she glanced over her shoulder to see him loping along behind. She fell into dry snow crystals, pukak, he straddled her and held her wrists wide above her head.
“What do you want?” She felt the sharp, cold air in her lungs and another deeper pang. He cocooned them in the bear skin and she pulled her braids apart, freeing her hair.
“What do you want?” she asked again.
“Etu,” he whispered.
She raised her hips to thrust against him. She knew she would not stop him this time; that she was ready; that she wanted him; that it was right. He loosened her tunic and she felt his warm leathery hands gentle against her breasts. They raced to open the seal and caribou skins that held in their precious body heat. He bent and kissed the wedge of her fur and entered her most enchanting, most powerful place with urgent homage.
She grabbed his shoulders, pulled her head up and with mouth and eyes wide open, surged against him. He burst through the final obstacle and Etu felt red flash from a spot in the sky over the base of his spine welding them together. She gasped air deeper into her lungs, hugged him to her, willed the red pain away, and replaced it with joy. The cold melted, the snow glowed and spasms rose within her. She crimped her eyes shut, translucent lights danced in her brain, and she heard children’s voices chant in the air, the sound of candle ice dismantling on the lake.
The world around Etu dimmed as night fell, the sounds faded and euphoria set in, she opened her eyes to a sudden brightness resolving into a transparent aural curtain. The new lovers gazed at a tremulous evanescence of meadow green with a blue stream through it, a silk curtain rippling down in the night air. A high singing breeze blew a long banner of pale white-green and pink-rose that unfurled in lateral movements. A golden-yellow glow embossed the white-clad mountains.
He lay still within her until she pushed him gently on his biceps to signal her desire to ease her breathing. He pulled his weight from her and covered her again with fur and seal skin. She smiled quizzically as she noticed the spot of red foam on him; reached for a handful of saturated snow, masak, and cleansed him before she threw the redness out of their bearskin nest. With the care of a novitiate she arranged his furs and seal skin about him.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like the chief of all polar bears. And how are you? Any pain?”
“It is as if this body sleeps and only the eyes and brain are awake, as if body and spirit changed places, swift and slow turn to their contraries. You have tickled the brain, the spirit of this girl.”
“Yes, two brains do this,” and he lifted his hands out of the bearskin, wiggled his intertwined fingers against the curtain of light.
She braided her hair and they rose together. He draped the polar bear skin around them as they rotated to take in the ever changing, multicolored hemisphere. Parr told her that Giant Spirits in the sky played a great game of kickball to cause this spectacular light show and that she must whistle, blow on her fingers, to let the Spirits know she watched the game. They laughed into each others eyes as owners of a mutual secret at the one red spot that stayed true, while the rest of the snow reflected the incandescent, celestial show.
She wiped the blood from her beloved's face with a scrap of white fox fur and tucked it into her sleeve. Mother and son dressed Parr's body in his best clothes, wrapped him in a caribou skin, and the men carried him to the boat. Italoo gathered his father’s weapons, his immaculately sharp spear perfect in its straightness from ivory tip to carved end; his well-worn bow and caribou-decorated quiver of arrows; his atlatl smoothed to the shape of his forearm; his fish trident with its precious copper barbs; his beautifully carved fishing lures with eyes of stone; and, his nanurak to kneel on in the great hunting ground in the afterlife.
Sleet blew sideways into their faces as women of the village paddled the umiak through the steel grey sea and men surrounded the whaling boat in their kayaks. They moved her husband to the burial grounds to lay him on the rock where Italoo set his father’s hunting gear within easy reach. They each placed a rock on him until they entombed the hunter and his implements. She removed the blood-stained scrap of fur from her sleeve and laid it on Parr’s cairn, a single red spot on the snow-covered tundra.
They headed back to the village, the sleet gone and the wind behind them. She sat in the stern of the umiak, covered by her ancient polar bear rug now hairless and black and she smelled his death there. A scent-memory tickled her mind from the first time he had wrapped her in the rug. Her delicate smile befuddled the other mourners in the boat. Etu alone saw another red spot in the snows of long ago. She heard a drum-song thrum through her.
Inyaiya-ya-ya
Parr drum
Drum Parr
Parr drum
Inyaiya-ya-ya
The villagers propelled her along the shore as she wondered what the surrounding snowfields would look like if she had produced a speck of red foam everytime they made love. She thought red spotted snow would surround the camp sites of the Amarakmiut, the Oogoorukmiut and the Tornarssukiut; spread over the caribou hunting grounds; continue along the shore where they sheltered from storms under this same umiak; certainly over the polar bear skin; and once, when they expected to die, on an ice floe that drifted out to sea and mysteriously back again.
She peered across the water to the burial ground to picture him in his grave in the center of a red spotted landscape of snow. The Night-sky Spirits rustled through her brain and colored the world with irridescent flashes of blue, green, red and purple. The pure high voices sang above her again, while the others heard the roar of the sea and dwelt in the various shades of grey and endless, endless white.
