White Bear

She begins to board the flight
     to Albuquerque. Late night.
But stops in the corrugated tunnel,
     a space between leaving and staying,
where the night sky catches

          her whole life

she has felt like a woman
     balancing on a wooden nickel heart
approaching herself from here to
     there, Tulsa or New York
with knives or cornmeal.

The last flight someone talked
     about how coming from Seattle
the pilot flew a circle
     over Mount Saint Helens; she sat
quiet (but had seen the eruption
     as the earth beginning
to come apart, as in birth
     out of violence).

She watches the yellow lights
     of towns below the airplane flicker,
fade and fall backwards. Somewhere,
     she dreamed, there is the white bear
moving down from the north, motioning her paws
     like a long arctic night, that kind
of circle and the whole world balanced
     between carved of ebony and ice

          oh so hard

the clear black nights
     like her daughter’s eyes, and the white
bear moon, cupped like an ivory rocking
     cradle, tipping back it could go
either way

          all darkness

               is open to all light.
 

Originally appeared in the publication, She Had Some Horses (copyright, Joy Harjo,1983, 1997 by Thunder's Mouth Press) and later reprinted in How We Became Human: New And Selected Poems 1975-2001 (copyright, Joy Harjo, 2002).