Nocturne at 2 a.m., and: sub-imago (shedding names), and: Taxonomy

Abstract

Nocturne at 2 a.m., and: sub-imago (shedding names), and: Taxonomy Kimberly Blaeser (bio) Nocturne at 2 a.m. Imagine our paddling until a full-star skymy daughter freshly twenty-one,the Milky Way—a sky of ancient enveloping us,goblet of night alight with silver. How to write swallowed, trace our vanishinto damp caress? Around us water stretchescalm in a blue dark forever. A perhapsworld. Vast dome where it rains stars—where they float twinkling on all sidessinging us now, both empty and full. You must not envy me what happens next:sit close in the rhythm of a small canoepurpled by night, we becoming water,becoming wave—spirit already satedwhen vowels of loon call open the nightrise in a great hollowness, echo in tremolo.There is water in the song—a nectar, a silk. We put down our oars then (holy abandonment)lay back in the newness of unwritten night—world brimming with what remakes us.Impossibly, as the loon's song diminishesan answer comes. From across the lakewaves of the haunting music—crescendoand dimuendo. Full-throated, call and response.I think the stars danced then. I think we did. [End Page 89] sub-imago (shedding names) Where zaaga?igan ripples like corduroycheckered bodies bob on the wake,fish-weed-iron scent and feet in silt—glare on a crossing boat is news. I am aging out of survey boxes.We want off the Schoolcraft map—islands like dances we have saved,my canoe paddle hungers in rhythm. Manidoog have written on the rocks—pictographs and water levels imprintedold markers shimmer—alive on northern air.Lake is a calendar like harvest. We are lunar. When ode?iminike-gizis rises.Mayflies sprinkle water with translucencetheir tiny bodies feed ogaawag—feed us.Still jagged, we offer song and gifts of aseema— all these tobacco ways we feast spirits.No need to speak of treaty, scars—of healing.We tell cribbage hands under this ancient—star story–wolf howl–berry cloth of kinship. Taxonomy The ancestors live in boxes now. I live squared—only head. The world is blue screen, is scream.Name something intact—without acronyms. [End Page 90] Morning cormorant a silhouette—elongatedin familiar, a routine of hunger, then bulk.We swallow whole the impossible. No onefeeds prettily. Avert your eyes, survive. The ancestors live in white—cardboard boxes.I am fasting. No news feed. Or rumor. Politicsa super-spreader. How we shelter in non-places. Here the hooked bill of the cormorant fills(I ignore the chat, have exited the Zoom room).My dry throat opens—to swallow, convulsesby reflex or instinct. Waterbirds, we live this story. Ancestors wait on shelves in numbered boxes. They dive, propel themselves with webbed feet.Shaggy cormorant wings spread wide to dry.Perhaps we are not praying when we lift our hands. [End Page 91] Kimberly Blaeser Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets and former Wisconsin poet laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikweniimi: Dancing Resistance. She is a University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee professor emerita and mfa faculty member for the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her book, Ancient Light, is forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in 2024. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press