Subarctic 5

The day does not end and so the ghosts come out in daylight
nothing supernatural about them, just a part of the landscape
where the herons pick their twig feet up and place them down
where the albino reindeer is perpetually catching up to the herd
and shadows rest in sunsets for hours staging mosquito ballets
the ghosts need a vacation and the mosquitoes don’t bite them
and if someone is awake on the lake at three am so be it then
it is so quiet nobody will be afraid the sun stays in the sky
for weeks and you are telling me ghosts are strange the wind

ascends into the sky and vanishes without exhaling you say
the witching hour of the ox the wee black mass the dark dark
I pass through the trees to the palm of the lake. Tuula weeds.
Later, coffee. My grandmother stands on the shore wearing red
lipstick, corals and amber. She holds hands with her favorite
brother, squints. Two sheep run up to the bank and I trail them
with my eyes. When I look back she’s moved behind a birch or
stone or sunray. I bend down to eat last year’s whortleberries.
My body remembers that somewhere else it may have been grieving.

__________

Mariya (Masha) Deykute is a Russian-American poet and translator. She is a graduate of the UMass: Boston MFA program and currently teaches rhetoric and creative writing in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan. Mostly, she writes about the wilderness that exists inside and alongside all of us.