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Surviving the Six Worlds


ISSUE:  Winter 2000
For David Sanipass

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

each world a hybrid we move through,
blink, bend and flutter
where the roots are
and each power, a sigh or hiss
at the edges of these things
that live beyond us
in their hush and whisper
as water becomes land
and land, air.

The red frog in the dead pool,
the black bear by road side
and that long dream where words
become a crow call we wake to,
eroding into this life.

Learn where to walk and where not to,
listen to the wind
as if it too might become us,
a discovering in our feet
where each road is.

Look, a redwing blackbird
settles on the birch branch,
and in its croaking,
we glide by in our slow
melt and shine, a transparency
we think as solid as stone,
but in a flash, gone.

Smelling the lilac in the wind,
we sense how a foot will ache
before finding its step, its signature
in this white world
decaying green and back again.

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