Shoelaces

The crescendo of a silent chord

In a hollow room

Carved of rain

 

Three push, three pull

Tearing at the black sacks

Too lazy to turn for snow

 

Pick handfuls, throw greens,

These Lutheran profanities,

Go unshod and hair-sighted

 

A map dark with

Broken-shinned strides not taken

In the barely icy rice coast

 

Crowbill carrion and a bleached

    rifle stock

For the empty umiak

 

I have only ashy long-gone words

A short-headed grammar

of polyonymy.

 

I speak contempt for the shit crows

And splinter

                    Eyes

                Splinter

                            Knees

                        Splinter

                                 Blood

             Splinter

 

The laminated ritual-resistant

Artefacts of smoke

Smuggled from a harbour

Changing its name

On a rat ship of soil

From harvests still to come,

Jellied seeds and the winter's ache,

Where only the crows grow fat.