A Walrus Tusk from Alaska
By Alfred Corn
Arp might have done a version in white marble,
the model held aloft, in approximate awe:
this tough cross-section oval of tusk,
dense and cool as fossil cranium—
preliminary bloodshed condonable
if Inupiat hunters on King Island may
follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky,
echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers
on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured
and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor
mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater.
Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task
and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so?
Netted incisions black as an etching
saw a way to scratch in living infinitives
known since the Miocene to have animated
the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump,
and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc,
salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ...
Farther along the bone conveyor belt a small
ringed seal will never not be swimming, part-time
landlubber, who may feel overshadowed by the donor
walrus ahead. And by his scribal tusk, which stands
in direct correspondence to the draftsman’s burin,
skillful enough to score their tapeloop ostinato,
no harp sonata, but, instead, the humpback whale’s
yearning bassoon (still audible if you cup
the keepsake to your ear and let it sound the depths).
Copyright Credit: Alfred Corn, “A Walrus Tusk from Alaska” from Contradictions. Copyright © 2002 by Alfred Corn. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Contradictions: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)