I Have No Totem

I am a white man.
If I say I have a totem I steal
someone else's myth. But, in a hard
time, when I walked among spruce
and hemlock down to the alders
on the bank of the Indian River to pray,
a kingfisher chattered at me
from a dead branch above
a clear, green pool.

by Peter Munro, from "A Fisheries Scientist Sights a Large School of Myth Swimming in Shallow Water in Southeast Alaska" from the archives of the Beloit Poetry Journal