A place for wisdom

On this second day of Native American Heritage month we note that Kimberly Blaeser is the November 2021 Poem-a-Day guest editor! Listen to an interview about her curatorial process and artistic practice at poets.org

Boundary Waters: key words

Photo by J. Harrington

A couple of years ago, the Better Half and I participated in a writing workshop Blaeser conducted at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, entitled “Wisdom Sits In Places”: Creative Writing from the Natural World. In fact, I believe the Better Half may have “given" us the registration fees as an anniversary present. One of the places the workshop explored vicariously was Minnesota’s Boundary Waters [see photo above].

This posting has prompted me to dig out the file from the Places workshop and refreshed my aging memory about how much I enjoy Blaeser’s poetry. Some things to add to my list of items about which  to be thankful this Thanksgiving month include having several volumes of her poems available for rereading.

Since we are hoping for positive outcomes from Glasgow and COP26 actions on (re)solving climate breakdown, we also can be thankful that Blaeser has captured many of the problems to be considered in Glasgow in one of her poems about the wisdom of and on this place we call Earth.

Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life

by Kimberly Blaeser

Born
under the canopy of plenty
      the sweet unfolding
      season’s of a planet’s youth,
in the trance of capitalism we take our fill 
content with the status quo
pull our shades on encroaching collapse
say something about Anthropocene,
the energy barter and the holy fortress of science.

But beyond
the throat of commerce, 
beneath the reflection
               of the celestial river,
within the ancient copper beauty of belonging 
we stand encircled
       inhabit the Ish,
navigate by the singing of songs.

Though money fog settles around,
confounds measure 
today veil of mystery        shifts 
lifts  for momentary       sigh t.
         Here
find rhythm of a tattered planet,
feel on panther mound
a pulse.        Listen—don’t count. 
Feel  small  life  drum  beneath ______.


My core.     I am    ancient refracted light
or sound
traveling,
my frequency a constant 
my voice
bending at angles
to become whole in another surface— 
say a poem.

Say a poem
perpendicular to the boundary
of meaning,
make it a prism or possibility
sing of turtle or cast the mythic lumen 
of thunderbird         here
on the flat   f alter          of words:

This page     not contract 
but covenant.
Sacred where.
When neither image nor voice 
will twin itself,
In the thick moist    cloud
of being
if the measure is life
each limb a nimble test      of tree 
glimpse     not see    nor calculate.

This Shroud of Commerce shrouds meaning.
In the technology of documentary genocide
in the destructive bonanza of the industrial age— 
declare the death of planet
as it passes    through a sound speed gradient 
comes out          on the other side
a lost echo of human greed
repeating itself
repeating itself
repea t in g

Each splinter of language
bent    in complicated formulas of inference 
of ownership
as fog forgets  then remembers         form.
But we find measure     in metaphor
vibration     earth     timbre.
Amid endless metric  errors
of science         or prayer
speak the ninety-nine names for god:

Gizhe-manidoo, Great Spirit, or longing, 
Knower of Subtleties, 
trembling aspen, the sung bones of salmon, 
braided sweetgrass,
the sacred hair bundles of women,
this edible landscape—
aki, nabi, ishkode, noodin,
the ten little winds of our whirled fingertips, 
this round dance of the seasons—

the ineffable flourishing.

With mind as holy wind
and voice a frog’s bellowous night song 
we arrive.
Here sandhill cranes mark sky.
If the measure is life—
their clan legs the length of forever. 
Here mirror of lake a canvas of belief. 
If the measure is life—
refraction the trigger of all knowing. 
Only this.

Now we place aseema,
the fragrant tobacco bodies of our relatives.
A sung offering.
To make the tattered whole. 
A question of survival.

Of correlation.

                       Of vision.

The measure is life.

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