Nine Below--Joy Harjo
Across the frozen Bering Sea is the invisible border
of two warring countries. I am loyal to neither,
only to the birds who fly over, laugh at the ridiculous
ways of humans, know wars destroy dreams,
divide the country, inside us. Last night there was a breaking
wave, in the center of a dream war.
You were there, but I couldn't see you. Woke up cold in a hot house.
Didn't sleep but fought the distances I had imagined,
and went back to find you. I called my heart's dogs,
gave them the sound of your blue saxophone to know you by,
and let them smell the shirt you wore when we last made love.
I walked with them south along the white sea, and
crossed to the fiery plane of my dreaming. We circled the place,
you were not there. I found nothing that I could see.
No trace of war, of you, but the dogs barked, rolled in your
smell, ears pricked at what they could hear that I couldn't.
They ran to me, licked the smell of the wet tracks of your mouth
on my neck, my shoulder.
They smelled you on my fingers, my face. They felt the quivering
nerve of emotion that forced me to live.
It made them nervous, excited. I loosened my mind's rein;
let them find you.
I watched them follow the invisible connection. They traveled a
spiral arc through an Asiatic burst of time.
There were no false boundaries between countries, between us.
They climbed the polar ice, saw it melt.
They flew through the shimmering houses of the gods,
crossed over into your childhood, and then south.
When they arrived in your heart's atmosphere it was an easy
sixty degrees.
The war was over, it had never begun. And you were alive and
laughing, standing beneath a fat sun, calling me home.
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