ISSUE 6

Zeke Shomler 

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The More I See, The More I Cannot Look Away

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The time has come for salmonberries,

horsetails with their fine green plant-threads hanging

taut from stems, then slack at the edges. Somewhere beyond

 

the permanency of language, the past

is a game I like to play. I look back at my mother as she picks

berries in the dentist’s parking lot, knees

 

bent before a bright green plastic mixing bowl

like an offering. I am trying

to unlearn this marrowed shame that has affixed itself

 

between my shoulder-blades, to know this dirt-scent

not as ruin but rebirth. Every day I stop myself

from plucking petals off the arctic roses—it’s habitual,

 

this pulling things apart, these fingers grasping

every fresh pink thing that strikes me. The sky,

orange with wildfire, asks a question

 

not addressed to any living thing. I walk unhurried

toward the lake, the slaughtered meat of ungulates

nipping at my heels and asking for remembrance. Beneath

 

my feet, the forest breathes and suckles

like a newborn.

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Geomorphology

 

We climb down to the river on our hands

and knees, catchflies and sweetvetch

sharpening their scent like the stone you hold

to chip away small fragments 

of another stone. There’s the drowning place, 

you say, pointing with your outstretched hand, 

where animals go to die. In dark and clay-rich 

mud, rocks assert their transformations:

wood grains, quartzite crystals, rivulets

like dripping melted glass. There must be

fossils here, memory of animals

embedded in the earth, not life

but something much more thankless,

more enduring, proof of continuity

between this moment and the next, like a vow, 

like the dandelion closing on its yellow 

to prepare white seed-tufts for release.

Now, after the solstice, darkness starts 

to creep again, slowly at first, then suddenly, 

the way you fall asleep between my arms. Glacial silt 

churns the river brown, rushing 

toward the Beaufort Sea where bones of whales 

compress to bioclastic limestone, where every fault

will shift, erupt, where every dirt-sweet life I hold

will crumble into sand. This is how I love you:

as the river loves the valley, as the valley

loves the bedrock, as the bedrock melts

and turns to magma, as the magma morphs

in darkness underneath our feet.

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