Considering GRIEF

Battleship Slide Runs on Red Mountain (photo by Jerry Roberts)

Avalanche

-for Rosemerry

Itki hits us hard in the face

Not just a slap

but a near-lethal blow

The full cold immense crush of grief

This entity we’ve never met

changing our names

to trauma

Halfback to my quarterback 

in the suburb’s flag football league

Greg

was my buddy

not just my brother

Jokester 

who’d make us giggle

hiding under the covers in his bed

telling funny stories

while parents moseyed around downstairs 

watching Fifties game shows

Dead at fifteen

In & out of El Camino Hospital

Nine months in the passing

Told us one morning with a laugh

that he’d seen himself in a dream taking

“a long walk off a short pier”

The whole family in denial

Trusting in Bishop Sheen’s 

rosary hour on the radio

& the anodyne fabulations

of our Roman hand-me-down 

faith

And yet his passing young

made me question

everything

Only to find most answers suffocating

as concrete

Eventually 

I swam my way out

free of the powder chutes

Avoiding chunky monkey rockfall

triumphant presidential krummholz

& all those beholden 

to the Imperium’s hard rock markets 

Digging out from under

the affluent overflow of a “free” world

addicted to capital

Time to open your eyes

Capt. Barefoot insists

Unpack compassion

Breathe in

the lyric valuables

cupped in your icy hands

Fill up on air ultimately

to float like a cloud 

above Lone Cone’s beauty ways

Stand in the sunlight beside

love’s melting slabs of tragedy

Art Goodtimes

Union of Mountain Poets

Jack Mueller Brigade

13023

NOTA BENE: 

“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of the world. As a pre-school teacher I learned that we learn by going through the known to the unknown. So instead of substituting “ki”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate, “itki.”  The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” That syllable, “ki”, is itkiself a Bodéwadmimwen suffix meaning “from the living earth.”