Limned
the stained
and ragged
tusk’s staggered
cracks, ancient
tusk, patiently
resting earth-bound
then found
and blanketed
with fragmented
visions
elisions of lines
revisions of limbs
of flukes and fins–
tusk and whale and hunter
each inhabiting the other.
Small lines
as fine
as needles–
deceitful
scratches scribed
and matched–
a bowhead
dead on the beach.
Dead tusk, dead whale
exuberant enlivened squall
broken strut of a boat
torn skin of a whale
both too fast ashore
to float sure between
floes and hollows
of ice
needled twice
with waiting
sea lions.
—
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. His essays and poems appear in Sky Island Journal, High Country News, The AutoEthnographer, and elsewhere.
