Klukwan Village
They said the bear was not that far behind us,
the three of us, detangling your netting.
You had just learned to weave that net in time for
the mighty river’s summer rain floodletting.
And silver silt was bleeding from the mountains,
the river was a soil and water wedding.
It ran like mercury behind your village.
It ran behind the houses of forgetting
where silver salmon hangs in crimson ribbons
enveloped in a smoke that’s always dreaming,
and in the village houses TVs mutter
while past their backdoors liquid life goes streaming
and time slides with it, chanting in a murmur
of how the People used to know the water
and how they celebrated in the summers
and thanked the fish that gave themselves to slaughter.
The parties-they went on for days, you tell me.
The wealthy clans made artful show of giving,
and all the time the river gave of herself;
the streams of dying fish flowed to the living.
I can imagine all the prideful dancing
in that lost world, all eyes were on the giver
who stood to gain the more he gave his People.
We hold the net, your eyes are on the river.
for Cory.
