The poor folks

"Wonder what the poor folks are doing today?"

He let out a sigh
and settled back on his overturned bucket,
as relaxed and satisfied
as if he were reclining in an easy chair
and putting up his feet.

"Who?" I asked, the first time I heard him say this.

"Those poor folks
who have so much
they don't know what to do with it," he said,

gesturing expansively around the small room.
Here was all he required in life, almost within arm's reach:
food, warmth, tobacco, good company.
What need had he of anything more?

-- T. Louise Freeman-Toole, writing about her friend Dave, an old-timer from Eagle, Alaska

This Dark Water

Reading in another man's book,
of voyages in a tropic sea
and strange thoughts
under the green silence
of an equatorial forest,
I found this passage:

"You, in the hard and bitter
north, on the exposed summit
of the world where Polaris
glitters in the forehead of a
frozen god . . ."

And it spoke to me of ourselves
here in the vast, lonely
twilight of Alaska
with the rumors of war steadily
pulsing against the hillside.

The friends we have
are few and distant,
their words reach us through
the onrushing season
like the hurried sentences
of those about to depart.

Appalling shadows grope
among the trees outside.
A nameless animal
crawls through the grass
to stand on hairy legs
and stare unblinking
through the window.

We have drawn in the flesh
against our bones
and gripped to our hearts
the warmth of our
troubled companionship.

It is as if we had been
sitting here for years, in a house
like a vessel bound outward
on the yellow tide of dusk,
with the helmsman asleep
and the sightless crew
staring ahead into nothing --
this dark water
that closes over our heads.

-- John Haines --