Morning Pages

Rain late last evening, near the end of April, and a light freeze overnight. This morning the windows feathered with frost as if the world had left fingerprints detailing its dreams of flight, and out for a cigarette with your first coffee, two dogs, and evaporate rising in the backyard, like smoke from a bush fire, up in the Pasqua hills, among the trees, just north and east of the peat bog where your cousin Elmer works, and where he sets up trail cams to catch ghost-like images of the caribou whose tracks he’s seen, where they come to calve in spring, the tangled undergrowth and the soft, wet land protection from the local wolf pack. And you are reading an article about two young, female poets—one from Greenland and one from the Marshall Islands—lives destroyed by the melting ice and others by the steadily rising tides. Communities thousands of miles apart. But violence is like that—it works up close and at great distances like spookily conjoined subatomic particles. For some reason, you think of a colleague at work, her saying, I love Indigenous cultures. They’re so beautiful, and you want to tell her to just keep it to herself, that you don’t give a fuck, that the people don’t need the wihtikow hunger of her appreciation and praise. Save it for your god, you want to say. You witnessed what she did with the old woman’s teachings about sage: she and her small, like-minded gang ran to the nearest bush, threw down some tobacco, and stripped it bare, then sat in the shade of a pickup truck and gossiped—they huddled and clucked—while plucking the leaves from thin branches. And you realise that image is an insult to chickens everywhere, but at least you’ve still got your sense of humour, even though you are feeling bitter this morning, like the taste on your fingers after lighting a smudge, even though you do nothing but sit down to play around with words, while the controlled spin of the world whisks all of us into a future devoid of human care and concern, or the lack thereof.