Reciprocity/Burial

By Richard Forbes, written to be read at a community poetry event in October 2022

Miche Wabun Glacier, named for a Cree sun god, hides in the northeast corner of Glacier National Park. A long-abandoned trail once brought visitors to the base of the valley where it lives but is now overgrown with dense shrubs and thickets. We reach the end of the trail already brush-whipped and are immediately forced to ford a river five times in a mile due to overgrowth. The river is numbingly cold, fed by the glacier we cannot yet see.

We set up camp and press upwards. The river becomes a series of waterfalls cutting through cliffs, and we stand together, looking at maps, trying to find a way through, feeling the day grow long. We decide to climb up a ridge to the north, hoping the alpine will provide easier passage. We slog up three thousand feet of shifting rock in less than a mile, hunting our way through intermittent cliffs over steep dropoffs. I am dropping behind Jonathan, whose relentless fitness I have begun to resent.

Black clouds begin to gather in the upper reaches of the valley. We don't talk about it. We reach the ridge just as the wind begins to whip us with light raindrops. From the top of the ridge, we can see the glacier, more than three miles away. The sun is going down. We are not going to make it. The decision, when we finally decide, is easy.

It is mid-August, and we are both working on separate projects to visit glaciers in Montana, to tell their stories, not as victims of a warming climate, but as powerful beings with whom we wish to find community and communion, and thus to share this concept with our own communities.

Jonathan is drawing the glaciers.

I am filming, photographing, and writing.

We stand buffeted by the blowing rain, wrapped in synthetic layers. I am uncomfortable with the extractive premise of my project, and so have decided, in an attempt at reciprocity, to bring the glaciers something human, some representation of what we've been doing, thinking, feeling, even while we've been changing the world. To make myself accountable to them. I have been reading the glaciers poems, not my own, because I'm not sure what to say to them, nor do I feel so self-confident as to want to suggest that my words are somehow representative of humanity.

Instead, I collect poems before trips. When I sit with a glacier, I leaf through them, then choose whichever feels right. Three miles away from Miche Wabun Glacier, even though the wind whips my words away, I begin to read.

Burial, by Ross Gay

You’re right, you’re right,

the fertilizer’s good—

it wasn’t a gang of dullards

came up with chucking

a fish in the planting hole

or some mid-wife got lucky

with the placenta—

oh, I’ll plant a tree here!_—

and a sudden flush of quince

and jam enough for months—yes,

the magic dust our bodies become

casts spells on the roots

about which a dumber man than me

could tell you the chemical processes,

but it’s just magic to me,

which is why a couple springs ago

when first putting in my two bare root plum trees

out back I took the jar which has become

my father’s house,

and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back

for my mother as much as me,

poured some of him in the planting holes

and he dove in glad for the robust air,

saddling a slight gust

into my nose and mouth,

chuckling as I coughed,

but mostly he disappeared

into the minor yawns in the earth

into which I placed the trees,

splaying wide their roots,

casting the grey dust of my old man

evenly throughout the hole,

replacing then the clods

of dense Indiana soil until the roots

and my father were buried,

watering it in all with one hand

while holding the tree

with the other straight as the flag

to the nation of simple joy

of which my father is now a naturalized citizen,

waving the flag

from his subterranean lair,

the roots curled around him

like shawls or jungle gyms, like

hookahs or the arms of ancestors,

before breast-stroking into the xylem,

riding the elevator up

through the cambium and into the leaves where,

when you put your ear close enough,

you can hear him whisper

good morning, where, if you close your eyes

and push your face you can feel

his stubbly jowls and good lord

this year he was giddy at the first

real fruit set and nestled into the 30 or 40 plums

in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat

with his hands pressed against the purple skin

like cathedral glass,

and imagine his joy as the sun

wizarded forth those abundant sugars

and I plodded barefoot

and prayerful at the first ripe plum’s swell and blush,

almost weepy conjuring

some surely ponderous verse

to convey this bottomless grace,

you know, oh father oh father kind of stuff,

hundreds of hot air balloons

filling the sky in my chest, replacing his intubated body

listing like a boat keel side up, replacing

the steady stream of water from the one eye

which his brother wiped before removing the tube,

keeping his hand on the forehead

until the last wind in his body wandered off,

while my brother wailed like an animal,

and my mother said, weeping,

it’s ok, it’s ok, you can go honey,

at all of which my father

guffawed by kicking from the first bite

buckets of juice down my chin,

staining one of my two button-down shirts,

the salmon colored silk one, hollering

there’s more of that!

almost dancing now in the plum,

in the tree, the way he did as a person,

bent over and biting his lip

and chucking the one hip out

then the other with his elbows cocked

and fists loosely made

and eyes closed and mouth made trumpet

when he knew he could make you happy

just by being a little silly

and sweet.