Inukshuk by Gregory Spatz Page A

movie or your Facebook or whatever it is you waste your time on these days.”
    â€œI’m not wasting time, Devon.”
    â€œWell, that’s good. Better than I could say at your age. Do me a favor, though?”
    â€œWhat’s that.”
    â€œEat some LEMONS. Eat some good juicy lemons and ORANGES. And then suck on some of those ester C lozenge things. Ain’t worth killing yourself over a little art project. Believe me . . .”
    â€œIt’s not a little art project.”
    â€œHave it your way.”
    â€œBut wait. You didn’t—did Dad say anything to you about, you know?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou know, did you talk to Dad at all about the whole . . .”
    â€œRelax, bro. Your little secret’s safe with me. I didn’t say a word.”

    â€œOK. Same goes for here, then. I guess.”
    â€œI don’t follow. Same what?”
    â€œ Your secret.”
    â€œYou mean the new tats and—wait. Are you blackmailing me, Thomas?”
    â€œI’m just saying . . .”
    â€œBecause for a second I thought that’s what I was hearing.”
    Silence.
    â€œCiao, fratello.”
    â€œOK, Devon. Bye.”
    Â 
    Â 
    Sunlight hot on every stone . . . sometimes he could see his way right into it and remember all his original inspiration: man-faced seals, two of them, riding the inner trough of a wave, the older one chin-to-chest, back-swimming, younger one following, tail weaving in and out of water. Father and son. Flash of light in the lifting water between them, brilliant, hot as the sun-hot stones ashore—and at the crest of the next wave, the white longboat, gunner at the prow, gun raised. The older seal knows what’s next even before the puff of gun smoke and delayed report of the gun. He doesn’t dive to safety through the wave or look away from the gunner’s eyes. Oh but you will be sorry, he wants to tell the gunner. You would kill your own wife’s only son . But he has no language for it, no man speech anymore. Only knowledge.
    Franklin had been aiming for this moment, the final death scene, final wave, for as long as he’d been compiling the poems leading up to it: birth of the selkie changeling in blood and seawater; man eyes peering from a seal-whiskered face; and later, the poems of his shape-shifting to come ashore—rounded black seal eyes in a man-whiskered face, drunk as only a human can be and air-swimming, bar to bar, touch of sweet nighttime on him everywhere; seduction of the land mother in a firelit laundry room; firelight on the stone hearth and sheets; more blood; departure, and then the return to land seven years later, again man-formed, fur hidden in a heap
under a rock, to purchase his son with a bag of gold and foretell for her their deaths (his own and his son’s) at the hand of her future husband. When he could, when he believed, he flew straight in: his own transmutations of icy Albertan prairie, white prairie light, oil fields, distant Rocky Mountains and cottonwoods, into poetry—into seals and men and seal-men in the waters off the northernmost coast of England, and the imagined underwater selkie kingdom of Sule Skerry—all of it cohering in lines and words he understood about as well as he did his own blood circulation. Other times, it was drudgery. Swimming against a tide of ill-matched words and worlds. Lines that didn’t breathe or scan right, iambs and spondees sticking through line breaks isolated and treacherous as shoals. Almost like he didn’t know the first thing about putting two words side by side—almost like he didn’t speak the language. Always it was a game, seeing his way back into it. Always, he was losing. And then getting it right again. He trusted neither instinct, not the one that said Quit now , nor the one that said Go on .
    The call from Devon had thrown him out, of course. Happily. He was always glad for a call from his son, never