"puget" poems - Hello Poetry

Orcas in Puget Sound Along the road, abandoned wild apple trees bend with their heavy loads, dusty skirts of blackberry bushes purpling fingers, piercing flesh mouths ringed with berry juice, vampires all. Along San Juan Island salmon leap clear out of the briny water, just yards ahead of their predators, Orcas, dorsal fins curving shiny black, sluicing and slicing the surface like sharpened knives They have bred with one another for 10,000 years trolled these waters through famine, earthquakes, world wars through shifting continents, glacial avalanches, through the extinction of whole civilizations. Standing on a cliff, my daughter and I watch the Orcas churning the water - studies in grace the largest gem on the necklace of a great food chain and when we sleep we too chase the great King Salmon of our deepest dreams, the fathers we lost, the currents that bear along children Translucent jellyfish, palm sized, breath below sideways exhale, convulsive inhale umbrellas opening and closing a thousand years or more sliding through forests of brown kelp where mollusks cling We have clung like this to one another, with my body thrown over hers for protection and her exhaling away from me If Mama Orca keeps her young close, so will I If there are salmon to chase and harbor seals to command, so we will Arcing in the late August sky slapping and parting the surface, over and over the whales, lords of the Sound, swim in our brains as we sleep sparkle against blackening waters You are of my body from my body cleaving there for 10,000 years Whatever quarrels there are on land vaporize In the presence of these creatures, arcing against all that is temporal, vicious, small, studies in power and grace The tide pulls out, skimming across rocks and oysters in their muddy beds But this need to care for you remains as big as an Orca your appetite for adventure as voracious and I watch you, my child, disappearing with summer into high school, into womanhood, into the salty, light-dappled ocean

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Jul 15, 2012

Jul 15, 2012 at 4:15 PM UTC

nika-cavat

Orcas in Puget Sound

Orcas in Puget Sound Along the road, abandoned wild apple trees bend with their heavy loads, dusty skirts of blackberry bushes purpling fingers, piercing flesh mouths ringed with berry juice, vampires all. Along San Juan Island salmon leap clear out of the briny water, just yards ahead of their predators, Orcas, dorsal fins curving shiny black, sluicing and slicing the surface like sharpened knives They have bred with one another for 10,000 years trolled these waters through famine, earthquakes, world wars through shifting continents, glacial avalanches, through the extinction of whole civilizations. Standing on a cliff, my daughter and I watch the Orcas churning the water - studies in grace the largest gem on the necklace of a great food chain and when we sleep we too chase the great King Salmon of our deepest dreams, the fathers we lost, the currents that bear along children Translucent jellyfish, palm sized, breath below sideways exhale, convulsive inhale umbrellas opening and closing a thousand years or more sliding through forests of brown kelp where mollusks cling We have clung like this to one another, with my body thrown over hers for protection and her exhaling away from me If Mama Orca keeps her young close, so will I If there are salmon to chase and harbor seals to command, so we will Arcing in the late August sky slapping and parting the surface, over and over the whales, lords of the Sound, swim in our brains as we sleep sparkle against blackening waters You are of my body from my body cleaving there for 10,000 years Whatever quarrels there are on land vaporize In the presence of these creatures, arcing against all that is temporal, vicious, small, studies in power and grace The tide pulls out, skimming across rocks and oysters in their muddy beds But this need to care for you remains as big as an Orca your appetite for adventure as voracious and I watch you, my child, disappearing with summer into high school, into womanhood, into the salty, light-dappled ocean