DARYL FARMER

Sangre de Cristos

Far away, my father is dying.
What has he to live for, I wonder,
but life itself, the blanket’s warmth,
to wake to light through the window,
to carry on long days of decline
in a recliner before a silent television.
Here, rain drips from the rooftop.
Steady, like a sand glass.
On the morning I was born,
he drove across state to hold me,
mine a body that would become
this vessel that masks a madness
kept carefully hidden away.
You’re always so calm, a friend
tells me. But no, not true, not calm.
Just an inertia that mimics stillness
but inside a rabbit’s heart quivers.
Now, far away, my father is dying
and the ground beneath me is crumbling.
I shudder in the night’s chill.
The past is a collage of chaos
I struggle to order. Here, in
elevations similar to those mountains
where once we walked the forest together,
I stand in the rain and sing sorrow
to the darkness until, so cold,
I tremor with the aspen leaves.

Skansbukta, Spitsbergen

To say it was magic diminishes
the magic it was. The soft subdued light
of mid-morning, the sea bathing

shore stones, the old boat, its hull worn
and weathered, leaning toward Skansen.
The old trapper’s hut in ruins, abandoned

yet inviting, its windows open to the freeze.
That cold that was not really cold, the light
that was not really light. Oh, how words

abandon me here. The wild call of the belugas
we’d heard several days before seem the only
language for it, or the way the glacier’s

thunderous crash entered the silence,
but could not fill it. The spotted seal that
surfaced and watched us, we artists, foreigners

clearly ill-equipped. When we sat in the snow
to join the stillness, we grew restless, and when
we wandered the coast we wanted to stop

and enter its sublime quiescence. Time too
was different, and the foundation beneath all
that we’d been shifted such that our meditations

became not verb, but existence. Does it make sense
to give in to an ending here? To pretend that even
for a moment I have explained it at all?

This poem is a plea, asking you, reader, to return me,
return me, not just to the fjords and the sea,
but to the me that I was last autumn in Svalbard.

Daryl Farmer is the author of the nonfiction book Bicycling Beyond the Divide, and Where We Land, a collection of short fiction. His recent work has appeared in terrain.org, Ploughshares, and Natural Bridge among other literary journals. He is an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Sarah Gerats (NL, BE) studied in Amsterdam, Reykjavik, Helsinki and Ghent. In 2012 she accidentally moved to Svalbard, an archipelago at 78 degrees North, where she has been living and working since. She combines her artistic practice with working on tall ships as a guide, both in the far North and the deep South.

ISSUE 20