The Ecology of Subsistence
No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers
frozen lake water refracting blue cinders.
By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow:
cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor.
A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through
the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines.
One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of
a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown.
On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon
waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill.
Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line
pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish.
A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou
hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty.
Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore
a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin.
Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold
flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane.
A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream;
underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury.
Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries
drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke.
A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum;
she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.
Copyright Credit: Cathy Tagnak Rexford, "The Ecology of Subsistence" from Effigies. Copyright © by Cathy Tagnak Rexford. Reprinted by permission of Salt Publishing.