Doris Lynch’s collection Swimming to Alaska was published in November 2023 by Bottom Dog Press. The poems describe her Alaskan adventures including a year in an arctic village. Her haibun collection Meteor Hound, published by MediaJazz.com, also came out in 2023. She’s won fellowships from the Alaska Council on the Arts and Indiana Arts Council.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Doris, what poems have you brought for us today?
Feeding an Orphan Reindeer Fawn
First know it’s the sorrow
in her eyes that you are feeding.
Then cover your arm with
the soft stubbed hair of the doe.
Fill a baby bottle with formula,
Land O’ Lakes, or you can make
your own. Here’s a recipe:
26 ounces evaporated milk,
2 generous ounces cod liver oil,
fresh egg if available.
Now, most importantly,
cup your furred hand
over the chin of the fawn,
and with that deer-wooed arm
pour your love into the calf
until your love ignites rivers
of moonlight in her eyes.
Lastly, never forget,
take a warm damp rag,
press it close against
the buttocks. Do this the first
week or two until she learns
to pass her manure easily,
until it comes dancing out
the folds of her skin.
The orphan will bond
with you then, buck the fates
of the universe for your love.
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Late August Beyond the Glacier
In Mendenhall Valley we sense
the dark shapes of horses
in the night, smell their dung
and the sweet promise of hay.
Stars revolve in the heavens
close enough to caress and a sliver
of moon gives us hunger, but
the whole night is about hunger:
the way wind off the icefields
erupts stars on our naked
flesh, the way the light of stars
pulse through our blood.
The way you eclipse the celestial
beings by climbing on top of me,
borrowing their fire. The way coyotes
claim night once, twice, thrice.
And the way the aurora borealis
shakes her wide sky-blanket
of viridian and red.
How love is like that night
light-filled and primal, and how
longing prods the horses
into the northern fields
to graze and graze until dawn.
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Leaving Kivalina
We arrived in Kivalina
like people fallen from a star
just two months after arriving in Alaska.
Now it’s time to depart, to leave
this land of ice-tundra, trumpeter
swan, snow geese. This narrow island
bumped by frazil, shuga, a thousand
kinds of sea ice. This land where
the Aurora Borealis rings out prayers
in timpani of sound.
We share our last meal at the Adams’ place
next door: Pilot bread, bowls brimming
with seal oil. Angeline serves muktuk,
whale skin, a treat from the cousins in Point Hope.
All through the meal, a mail-plane from Kotzebue
buzzes on the edge of consciousness. Even before
we’ve finished, Caleb’s three-wheeler roars
to the door and we jump into its storage cart.
Good-byes are quick, muted. We plan to return
in the fall but never do.
We soar over the black ravens,
the Californian-style houses
planted so far north, the village
school with its full-size gymnasium,
Kivalina’s two small churches, one Quaker,
one Episcopal from the days white ministers
assigned each village two Christian denominations.
We fly over the sea with its open leads,
the lagoon entrance with black melt-water roiling.
Already, the spring sun has scraped the tundra boulders
free of snow. We rise higher and higher
until the barrier island becomes a small,
white arm, until Kivalina’s houses
shrink into tiny match-boxes and the village
itself becomes as small and perfect
as my two year old’s hand.
You've been listening to the poems of Doris Lynch on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
