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Dreaming My Alaska

-a journey not yet taken

The early ones had traveled from the dreams
that filled my longing for this lonesome place
some once believed would show a Northwest Passage.
Jeweled mirror lakes and timid deer,
brown bear, gray wolves, mink, and foxes,
where eagles cluster like descending angels.
Teams of antlered elk are filing close
in lines and move on old migration tracks
where an alphabet of creatures follows.
In higher mountain streams the stipple-patterned
fish are darting over polishes stones
until some ancient urge makes them leap.
Walking barefoot makes me one with earth
to know the energy of wisdom present,
landscape lessons on how brief is life.
With oscillating gust of milder wind
incessant songbirds call repeatedly
as shadows flicker on their ruffled throats.
And a map unfolds itself to show
me nothing was before the flower-fields
that hid the poet’s fabled bee-loud glade.
We stop to thank the hunted animals
who gave themselves as meals to us, their guests,
reminding life entails surrendering.
Snowfalls, delicate or massive, cover
glacial mounds and stands of hardy grasses.
Spot sapphires strewn within the upturned soil.
The iron-grated gates of hill-top graveyards
near chapels built by Russian missionaries
shine with rain, a comfort to the dead.
Outlines are unfastening from bodies —
ghosts that waited, hidden underneath,
shaking loose my constant shivering.
The banking clouds as vast as continents
lift up their veil for every night,
as northern lights ignite dancing air.
The earth sees deep in me my brokenness
who sought to make a meaning out of words,
and writing of the land be whole again.
“But do not think to write it in earth’s image,”
it speaks and speaking says what I am not,
and casts on me the cloud of that unknown.
Look up, and see the wheel of stars in spasm,
And hear the heaven sing a single note,
while I seek Alaska in the heart.

—
Royal Rhodes, poet and essayist, is a retired educator who lives in a small village. He began sending out poems to journals in his mid-70s. His work has been published in numerous literary journals: Abandoned Mine, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, Ekphrastic Challenge, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere.

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