Matthew Nienow
What the Tundra Has to offer

Put your hands on this musky skin of treeless earth,
where just below the dust soil never thaws,
where willows twist knots into themselves
between hummocks and boulders

and the slow flame of a thousand
different lichens cut
an aurora into the ground,
slow and sharp as rust.

Pray for a wind that could almost knock you down—
because the black flies become a singular body
shifting with the hurried fluidity
of hunger, ready to burrow and rend

any section of your skin they can reach.
You can fill the cup of a hand with one
swoosh of sky, hold a buzzing clod of life,
and on windless days they will block the sun.

We’re out here for hundreds of mies
and months, waterways and overland,
days nearly lacking nights, weeks without sight
of people but for stone men inukshuks.

Twice now we’ve found a fresh rotting heap
of caribou—bones and fur, dribbling rot
into the water, while the warble flies
rip their way out from the egg sack belly.

It wasn’t until my boot almost crushed
the ribcage that I noticed the figure,
jaw crooked on a rock—a lesson on how
bodies are put together, by showing

how they come apart—slowly becoming
scattered tufts of skin and sinew, cracked bones
revealing jaundiced and yellow marrow,
the impossible puzzle of order.

Bones are the constant here—soggy muskeg,
straight edged cliff, miles of boulder fields,
and slowly arching prairie, all empty
but for the innumerable crowds of bones.

One day as we slipped through rocky shallows
we saw our first live caribou, were amazed
it didn’t move as we huddled closer,
until its neck craned around and we saw

flies walking on unblinking eyeballs,
its limbs, flimsy poles—warped, threadbare skin frayed
and we felt ashamed as voyeurs to know
we had lusted and eyed its last moments.

Trivial excitement, for a life
wavering at the end, waiting to die alone
and all of us, in that moment, knowing
all that would ever remain would be bone.

NB: This poem appeared previously in the 2006 issue of Trestle Creek Review, and in the author's chapbook Two Sides of the Same Thing, winner of the 2007 Copperdome Chapbook Award.

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