E.P. Schultz
Gijik Marsh

Gray feathers came soaring home tipping Elm sticks
stuck at attention in the muck of Gijik Marsh.
The swiveled lean of these sentries sent circle-waves
rushing the northern shore.

And captured on this breeze, through the browning
beards of cattails, a fresh, raw, peat-mouth taste,
sailing red in its dripping through flaring primordial
nostrils and across a sleeping tongue.

Through the window morning scent:
an admixtion—
3 parts cedar
2 parts deer snot
2 parts blood resting talon
of full hunted owl.

*

She spoke in late lake light
with half-moon mist on confident breath—
Whoo-hoot, Whoo-hoot, Whoo-hooting
a prayer to prey for their sacrificial crimson aspect.

Wise and swift, silent,
sneaking the unfeeling thought
into the sweet marsh scent.

And as the human stood in his darkness searching
for that inner voice smoking and reticent,
scratching at the burning in his breast:
energy to acknowledgment,

acknowledgment to intent
intent to sound—
and all to the faint wisps of venerated truths
dwelling in the smoldering fathoms of the heart,

the snort of a deer pierced the mind leaving it
silenced and dizzy from all the possible meanings.

But the chest rose up, coughed out a message
dripping with sooty snot fragmented by fiber-glass
and asphalt; the sound of human nature waking from
its long rational slumber, throwing off the shackles
that steel to rust the archaic response of the heart.

*

On the wind the smells of a hundred-hundred
ancient fires bleed through the air into
lungs ventilating those ancestral truths through
oxidized dreams in disarray; to have them pump
through a heart to disrupt the dismay of the object
of thought in order to find that constant feeling
that arise in Gijik smells of early autumn. Those
tantalizing spores that float and flutter in the
world that resides on the wing-tips of a breeze
feathered to breath.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #2: Winter 2008, Volume 1 Number 2