Triple Acrostic: Orcas
Why the pods that used to streak and shimmy
in Puget Sound's granitic light
have disappeared in recent decades: the reasons
speed like a killer Chris Craft through clouded
inland waters. Reasons subtle as a buccaneer's
logic: Goliath-girthed trunks of
Douglas fir that shadowed these estuaries
and mussel-crowded coves--all felled
by axes that traveled ever farther up the temperate rainforest's
northernmost reaches, their salal-shadowed mosses
exempted from protection by our bombast. In the global
dance that warms to its own internal warnings, coastlines
yield like Roosevelt elk hides espaliered against a
wall map of the illusory Northwest Passage--
aquatinted waves where the shades of orcas frolic.
In memory of "K7," a.k.a. "Lummi,"
leader of the Puget Sound K Pod,
disappeared in December 2007
at about 98 years of age.
Published in For Love of Orcas: an Anthology, edited by Jill McCabe Johnson and Andrew McBride, Wandering Aengus Press, 2019