Moving through: for Chris Matzigkeit (1981–2010)


Who could have known this would be us.
Ghosts on a road trip.
The way the dead have entered me and suddenly I am many crows
in one crow, feasting on the beautiful dropped prey of this hawk-life.
What we have left.
Driving into another cold town in the middle of the night
I stop for two deer picking through the crystals of ice
that keep forming.
They vanish. You don’t.
I only have to speak your name in the rhythm of wheels that push
me across this unimaginable land
and you have not left.
Broken only to vision.
As if the frozen lakes I am passing were not
clear water underneath.



This poem “Moving through: for Chris Matzigkeit (1981–2010)” originally appeared in Indigenous Focus. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 215 (Winter 2012): 69.

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