Wild
Mother married into the brown bears—
They never quite trusted her black hair
or her endless forwarding of internet videos,
but they trusted Dad, who farmed foxes
with a burdened, overweight tendency
whose fur was the softest thing on the glacier.
There were endless rules then. Like,
you shouldn’t throw old sofas in the river.
Never mention the bears’ family conflicts online.
Because of the scare of economic collapse
coffee and sugar were rationed.
We could pick a patch of blueberries only so big,
and we couldn’t break the branches.
We had to shake them into the basket.
We never thought bad things about the glacier
because it was always listening
and would take offense at our juvenile griping
about the tourists who crowded the viewing box
to see its flaccid mass backed into the mountains
that were frankly kind of underwhelming;
and when offended it would melt,
in great waves of silt-blue water
all over our poor attempts at art
like the popsicle-stick fence put up
by the missionaries, or Father’s pelts
that got finer when he crossed in wild stock
by digging the young out of burrows
when they were still pocket-sized.
Mother sent the video to PETA—
the bears said it was wild of her, immature
like swimming blind. But Dad said no,
she wasn’t wild—she was just still learning
how to live in our world.
Word Machine
You drove up at 5am
when it wouldn’t sink
or make too much noise
it’s important not to go too far
with language
it burns through fuel
like when you write
engagingly about how pipes
connect to other pipes
which once were rivers
I was thinking
if it’s not too far
we could go together
and shout into a megaphone
maybe throw
the whole migration
elk will wind up
in the inner city
fish will spawn
in space
when they hear us
say “temperature gradient”
nine times quickly
let’s conjure microbes
from the crevices
and song
from the fractured sky
and our two-stroke
engines dawning
all over the icefield
before they wake
that this is ours.
A place no one will find us
There was a river instead of a work camp
and an ocean instead of a train in the dark
there were fish in the river instead of shit hitting the fan
the way they threw their bodies at any old rock dam
I thought the river was a metaphor for Germany
so we walked through its cobble bed and crushed skeletons
we were looking for a place news wouldn’t reach us
over an ice terrain the cold was becoming a horizon
we fit under stars a million miles from that front
pinned against the night—not Alaskan or German sky
but the whole grumbling smoking and spitting fire
the great drag and distance of giants like ourselves
dirt and home and blot of trees on the horizon—
surprising how wide it opened to let us in.
We saved all year and it was probably worth it
Above the theater but below the water slides
teenage girls bloom like third world countries
under fashion magazines at the coloring station.
The weight room is between dining rooms two and three.
We dine each night with a strange, dead-eyed family
who teach us words like ‘head’ and ‘brig’
and when it is okay to disobey “No Smoking” signs
and when it is important to enforce them.
The sun deck, lodged between my overwhelming expectations.
Pets are not allowed here. A hospital afloat.
The first electronic cigarette is free, like the air,
which also feels outmoded when compared to, say,
the app that tells you how you’re feeling
by the dilation of your pupils in direct sunlight or
plots atmospheric deposition against happiness.
I read that cruise ships can collide with whales
and the passengers will never feel the impact. I asked,
which line has the lowest incidence of mammal strikes?
This line treats all effluent to intercoastal standards.
A track around the smokestack, beside a pool.
Fishing overboard is absolutely not allowed,
but whale watching is encouraged.
People like to elegize the whale even as she drifts freely
in her sea of accumulating nitrogen.
What kind of person filters photos of a whale
through fake seventies tints and posts them online?
The kind of person who loves the world secretly
through sepia tones with the glare softened to a glow
shadowed darker at the edges of the frame.
Which is to say, almost everyone.