I can hardly stand the rot
our cargo wafts: the redolent fat
of a Greenland Right, this year's legislated
cull of ancient rites stacked
aft of me in plastic-strapped
waxed boxes, despite which snappy
package, the stench of maqtaq
drenches this Hawker, as it did holds
of Victorian whalers, the same reek
at sixteen thousand feet as a hundred
stripped crangs corrupting
on Pond's Bay floes -- London's
streetlamps aglow and Oxford's dons
dry ‘neath baleen-ribbed brollies --
the same as it must have been -- and still is
in this land that hoards scars
and preserves what it kills --
cached under stacked stones
a thousand-odd years ago.

For seven years Zachariah Wells toiled as an airline cargo hand in the territory of Nunavut. A chapbook of his poems will be published by Saturday Morning Chapbooks (Charlottetown) in the spring of 2004, and his full-length collection of Arctic poems, Unsettled, is due out with Insomniac Press in the fall of that year. He now lives in Halifax and on the world wide web at www.zachariahwells.com.