The full moon-shaped muskeg pond
is covered in a thin film of ice.
I walk around it, my feet crunching frost,
my face haloed in winter sunlight.
I’m gathered here among the dried grass
and winter-spent, creeping vinelike stems
and all around me, are the old ones, those
300-year-old bull pines, bent in wind-shapes.
I consider my ancestors, scraping, drying
and grounding the pine bark into flour.
In the frozen mirrored pond, my ancestors
question me with curious eyes, their orbits
formed in patterns of icemelt like my own
ice-blue eyes. I don’t have any answers for them.
I feel I’m failing and falling away
from our traditions. Instead, I cut a small tree
for the holidays and bring it back home.
I decorate the branches with old fishing gear
and the green, plastic hoochie squid,
my father’s favorite lure for catching salmon,
now a holy token.
My father has died, and it’s been a year.
This is the second winter without him,
and though the cold-nip of grief still aches,
all that is on my mind is I don’t know how
to make pine flour either. I lean into the tree
for a sniff, and think of those intoxicating
long, red woody cones that will bloom
on the bull pine in spring and how
I will be there to witness it all.
