Surviving the Six Worlds

(for David Sanipass)

In the sixth world of the Mi’k maq,
you walk as if in water
fluid, changing and final.

Each world a hybrid you move through,
a blink, bend and flutter
where the roots are
and in each flower, a sigh or hiss
at the edges of things
that live beyond you
in their hush and whisper.
Water becomes land
and land, air.

The golden frog in the dead pool,
the black bear by the road side
and, in your long dream, a word
becomes a crow’s call you wake from
an erosion into this life and back again.

Learn where to walk and where not to,
listen to the wind as if it too
might become you,
discover in your feet
where each path leads.

Look, a redwing blackbird
settles on the birch branch
and, in its croak, you glide
in a slow melt and shine,
a transparency
as solid as stone,
but in a flash, gone.

Smell the lilac in the wind
and feel how your foot will ache
before finding its step, this is your
signature into this white world
where you can decay
green and back again.

First Published in Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 2000)
Forthcoming in The Lost Books of the Bestiary (V Press LC, 2021)