Elizabeth Bradfield

Fourth Occupation, Baffin Island

A slate foundation dug into the slope,
whale bones wedged in cracks, entranceway

sighting toward sea, heather lush from what
was scattered. One bone drilled and carved. Not

marked Thule site on the charts. Not yet forbidden.

I sat in the doorway. A caribou (reindeer, here called reindeer)
skull with only one antler was being buried by beach.

There were ridges to climb, valleys, falls, tundra
but I just wanted to sit, quiet, a falcon

scolding from the ridge, snowmelt gurgling through scree.

The Thule left because it got colder, because
there were no whales to hunt, and then

westerners encroached on their skin-spear boats. Vikings came
for a brief blush. Trappers, route-seekers, the foot

soldiers of politics. And us? This ship of us?
The land has not absorbed that story yet.

The falcon does not know that call.

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Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her awards also include a Stegner Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and is Associate Professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University.