At the top of the world I want to go for a drive
in a primitive troika lightly harnessed to reindeer.
Behind three clove-brown creatures, yoked together
yet bridleless, guided only by a long pole
that the driver taps to indicate gee and haw
I want to sled over the alpine tundra
race through boreal forests of birch and aspen
and glide past the boggy taiga daggered with black spruce trees.
I want to leap up at the three-nation caribou parley
in Whitehorse, Yukon, to warn them the radionuclides
absorbed from the lichen they live on may kill them
if they don’t drown in droves at crossings flooded
out by hydroelectric stations, or slowly
starve to death behind oil pipelines that posit
behavioral barriers they dare not soar over
or burst their aortas trying. I want to advise the species
to set up new herds, to mingle and multiply,
else how can I hurtle with them across the Kobuk River
at Onion Portage, be caught up in the streaming southward,
the harsh crowding of antlers uplifted like thousands
of stump-fingered arms? I’m slithering backward in time to
the Bering land bridge, awash at high tide, I cross over
nibbling down to Nevada, down to New Jersey,
I rejoice to be circumpolar, all of us
on all fours obeying the laws of migration.
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