Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist. In 2015 she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Karenne is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary, due out in spring 2016. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.
The Point
In autumn we crept down a mulched path
to the bank where cattails shone, bulrushes
concealing scarlet flags of the blackbirds.
The forest: humid scent of leaf-mold,
skittering of squirrels, the old buck’s track
toward a copse of knotted cedars.
I wanted to believe it wouldn’t end
and stepped behind you soundlessly
like one of the spirits who inhabit
these woods. We reached the blind,
finally, and trained our field glasses
until a few white spots gleamed—
eagles’ heads against pines—there, on the ridge.
Then, above us, one rose, and I held my breath.
There’s a furious sound— seven feet of wing
feathers displacing the air. What remains
as it ascends but a repetitious longing
and the silence that follows departure?
Wind for days, and then frost. As I walked
the trail without you, my shoes crushed
a lace of ice. Every eagle was gone.
Once I held one in my sights until its shape
blurred—the horizon overtook it, and the haze.
I scanned but could not locate the vanishing point.