You might like it if I said here
“He was married to Elektra,”—which
lends nobility to the lack
of wife or lover—“it was selfless
celibacy; work trumped women.”
But the fussy woodstove takes my
eyes from the page, its fan blades
spin as if underwater, the motor
slowly choked of charge.
Snow sits deep on the cooling
cabin. Ice on open channels
skims up the Arm, then gathers
back toward the Inlet. The floes
are daily evidence of how
the Arm unweaves itself:
Turnagain. Cakes of ice
bump shoulders, murmur like a crowd
at fairgrounds, their eyes ready
for the world to be different
from the place they imagined it was.
A crowd looked on as you
lit wireless lamps, made metal discs revolve
at considerable distance
from a spinning field like moons looping
round a planet. It wasn’t for anyone
in particular to see when you grasped
the live terminal and tentacles of light
streamed from your spine. Yet something
like a curl of hair, or a woman’s earring,
you found too distressing to touch.
Twilight grows between thin branches,
pools above the Arm like smoke.
We crank the radio for cheering
voices, snap on lights, set water to boil,
each of us quiet, roving
privately. I drop a fist of
pasta in the pot, and listen
to the news: another hunter
stranded, cut adrift by shifting
ice. The fracture shot between
an uncle and nephew stalking seals
in Hudson Bay. I pour two mugs of
wine and rest one at her elbow,
wondering what the hunters did when
one had no way back—the moment
they became aware. I crack
the stove door, turn the flue for air
on coals. The uncle might have
thrown some dry meat or an extra sleeping bag
across the rift. They may have
yelled encouragement, instructions.
There came a time when the only thing
to do was watch
each other’s features fade in hooded parkas,
see how small his shadow looks on the floe,
and how, at such a distance,
he could be anyone.