Joan Naviyuk Kane, Dark Traffic: Poems

 

Dark Passage

The fatherless child is taught to swim by his abandoned mother—
mouths on the mainland erase them as she casts him down
into the fishlessness of the black lake pooled from ice-melt 

on ice on the isle on which they live, together, distant
from those who banished them. His small palms grasp
a sealskin scraper, once wood. The water buoys his body. 

Between rainfall and unnamed waves, he shall rehearse
the flooded world she forgets and loses then fails
to remember when they help two hunters come to pass 

upon their land, alive with the drift meat of the rare carcass—
men sent to kill. The boy has grown to swim at sea,
yet it occurs to me not to demonstrate a story 

I am not to tell—for spit in the ocean,
            there is no end but wind.

Inupiaq American poet Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest full-length poetry title is Dark Traffic: Poems (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), a collection populated with ghosts and haunted by the trauma of colonialism through her familial communities of King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. The author of three prior full-length collections—The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (University of Alaska Press, 2012), Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) and Milk Black Carbon (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)—Kane writes of loss and the enormity of the weight of the past, and how it impacts the on the present, including echoes of her prior work. Early in the collection, for example, the poem “Milk Black Carbon” offers: “Take in the woman / who pursues a myth to counter another myth.” Through an assemblage of short, narrative lyrics, Kane’s poems examine a physical and deeply-present landscape across a range of temporality. “A glacier // makes a river of ice,” she writes, as part of “Upon Learning That She’s / Hung a Fox Pelt,” “of earth, / of everything that is & is not she. / A paradox: the present as a dark // text to (re)turn (in)to. She strikes / the bright inscriptions, which might / yet teem for a long time.” She writes of cultural and personal erasure, seeking to acknowledge the life and experience of Alice Tanaka Hidiko, who “clearly remembers / the bewilderment    & sense of violation / she felt 74 years ago when FBI agents rifled / through her family’s Juneau home, / then arrested her / father before he was sent to Japanese internment / camps, including a little-known camp in pre- / statehood Alaska.” (“White Alice Goes to Hell”).

There is an uneasiness to Kane’s lyric, perhaps even an anxiety, one that is shaped differently here than through her prose, although I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why, or what that means, although I continue to hope that her essay chapbook, A Few Lines in the Manifest (Philadelphia PI: Albion Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], is a project that might be part of something book-length, and very much still in-progress. Through both her poetry and her prose, Kane writes of and through myth and storytelling, offering a landscape built on narrative itself, a landscape that is still learning how to continue to thrive, or even sustain, despite and through such outside interference, including the ongoing and destructive bludgeon and erasures of American imperialism. “What does it mean to arrange hate / to look like verse? What becomes // of the ugly and meaningless?” she writes, as part of the poem “And One More Surprise with Fine Excess.” She writes to situate, observe and examine, refusing to allow a history written by others to determine, or even dismiss, what she has seen. She writes of marriage and of youth, and of further shifts required due to outside forces. “One does with for words to thaw / in the mouth,” she writes, as part of the poem “Nunataq,” “but find itsead a tongue, // welt.” This is a book of wounds, all of which exist in various states, from the permanent scar to the break to the open wound. Or, as she writes to end the poem “Sometimes There Are Even Scars”:

Perhaps I will not begin to cry
because of the ways in which I

mark the months as they accumulate
& fall away. No blood. No certainty.
I might yet reek of burnt things. 

my skirts may carry their stains
as I pass trap after deadfall trap,
the burin, the coffle of dog hitched 

to dogs hitched to a lading of oil.