Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WINTER NIGHT ON THE YENTNA RIVER, by ARLITIA JONES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WINTER NIGHT ON THE YENTNA RIVER, by                    
First Line: If the lives we live depend on the stories we tell
Subject(s): Fathers & Sons; Winter


for my father

If the lives we live depend on the stories we tell,
our story, I think, goes something like this:
Late December and the ambient temperature is - 45 degrees F.
Every sound becomes an echo rolling down

the frozen river -- ice popping, trees cracking
and the few words we say to one another.
I am in the lead. It's the only way, you say, you're gonna
learn to pick a trail. We travel by light of a full moon

dogging us over our left shoulders -- a bright body loping
along the rim of the land, coming through black spruce
an alder like an enormous white bear.
How am I not frightened by its approach?
On this

everything hinges: that it is winter and we are here
in this wilderness where other men bring their sons.
That you are a father unlike other fathers and I am your child --
A daughter luckier that most -- and by this I mean

that in a world that deems the smaller share for the girl
and the hero's portion for the male, you taught me
even what sons are given is not enough. I should ask more
of the journey, that we help each other find the way,

by turns, I follow you and you follow me
and eventually the trail is wide enough for side by side.
Always, thee will be wrong turns, the overflow to get around,
Pressure ridges to traverse. Our snow machine head lights

push lighted wedges into nightcold where open leads
appear unexpectedly. We never forget this night.
We never doubt that memory is the sixth sense that holds
the real significance of things that happen.

Looking back now, that remarkable moon
begins as a handful of snow a father squeezes
into a rough ball and hands to his daughter. We roll
it back and forth across the wide open snow-laden swamps

gathering layer upon layer until it's so heavy
it takes both of us together, lifting and stretching
to reach the sky, to rock the moon into
place and realign the heavens.


Copyright © Arlitia Jones
http://www.unl.edu/schooner/psmain.htm
Prarie Schooner is a literary quarterly published since 1927 which
publishes original stories, poetry, essays, and reviews. Regularly cited in the
prize journals, the magazine is considered one of the most prestigious of the
campus-based literary journals.







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