LIP SERVICE
Yesterday's moments are suddenly gone
as the rain washes summer away,
wets the leaves and seeps into our clothes.
The past is grey, low cloud hovering
and hiding what we want to remember.
Somebody I used to be is waving back
across time and saying goodbye,
the quiet hero of my own devising,
waiting for space to be and to have been.
Surviving is not living, the ghost
at the crossroads is me, full of indecision
and longing, paying lip service to self.
Slow blink, heart flutter, cold eskimo kiss.
--Mark Matcho
The “Eskimo” are the indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia, across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. They consist of two main groups, the Yupik of eastern Siberia and Alaska, and the Alaskan Iñupiat and the Inuit of Greenland and Canada. A third northern group, the Aleut, is closely related. Many regard “Eskimo” to be a pejorative term; it comes from the French “Esquimau,” probably a transliteration of the Innu-aimun term used by the Montagnais in Labrador and Quebec to refer to the neighboring Mi'kmaq people, perhaps “ayas̆kimew,” the word for "snowshoe-netter" or "to net snowshoes” or the Cree “askamiciw” (“he eats it raw"); it may also mean "people who speak a different language." [Innu-aimun is an Algonquian language spoken in Eastern Canada; French traders along the Atlantic adopted their word for the more western peoples and applied it generally to northern groups. Lihnuistically the term is related to the name of the “husky”dog.] An “Eskimo kiss” is the act of pressing the tip of one's nose against another's and is loosely based on a traditional Canadian Inuit greeting called a kunik (“kiss”), a non-erotic form of affection between family members and loved ones that involves pressing the nose and upper lip against the other’s cheeks or forehead and breathing in, causing the loved one's skin or hair to be suctioned against the nose and upper lip. The practice does not involve touching noses end to end or rubbing them back and forth against each other. The Kooks, a British rock band, featured “Eskimo Kiss,” a song written by Luke Pritchard and Tony Hoffer, on their 2009 album "Junk of the Heart":
ReplyDeleteWe had so much fun
She gave me an Eskimo kiss
We put our records on
And set sail towards the sun,
Oh it's so much fun
She's like the rose without a thorn,
She's like the sunflower that never looks back at the sun
She sees me running
She's like a diamond in the rough
She's like the first girl on this earth that you wanted to touch,
She sees me running
We went back to her place
Her father says I have the wrong face
He put another one on
We set sail, as the night gets long,
Oh, it's so much fun!
She's like the rose without a thorn,
She's like the sunflower that never looks back at the sun
She sees me running
She's like the diamond in the rough
She's like the first girl on this earth that you wanted to touch,
She sees me running, sees me running
Oh, lonely bones
Well, I'm coming through the sun
And our lives have just begun
Oh, lonely bones
Yeah, I'm coming through the sun
And our lives have just begun
And it goes
La la la la la
La la la la la
La la la la la
And it goes
La la la la la
Did you ever wonder why
This old word will make you cry?
And it goes
La la la la la
Did you ever wonder why
This old word will make you cry?