Old Squaw Duck
Ostracized, a crone cross-breed
half wolverine crochets a silken thread.
Looping, welting a seam hinged
at either end, she whittles a basket of flesh.
She plunders the rock beech holding
a staff with a crook, a bishop's crosier,
she stole from a Russian Orthodox church
in Kotzebue. At the turn of the season,
her fingers long with soot under each nail
dirty from climbing the hillside, to scan for fish
or of the signs of copepods, she cleans them
with a rag, scraping the knife swiftly under the nail.
She's an old squaw duck who travels through regions
departing slowly like putty of spruce gum kutchuq
sliding down bark or resin drying a hipbone
of an old squaw duck ruptured by trudging through
loosened tundra, who sunk into a marsh hole. Now
I keep hidden in the storm-shed until summer,
feeding her Dolly Varden, she seems weightless
part of it might be, because she is infested with chiggers,
somehow her matted fur hangs like sockeye eggs
in river kelp, pooling in rocks. Somehow I chase
the red pests away belching like an ant bird
pecking like a sandpiper the fleas jumping to lichen.