KXOT Presents
Tami Kosch
07/09/2008
POINT DEFIANCE When I visit her, I find a sea widow scanning the bay, hair of braided epiphytes askew, the blast of wind across the bay her keening. Footpaths cross her heart: ligatures suture rags of tissue, strain against arrhythmia. In her secret embrasure anomalous snow convenes, fistfuls of confetti, forgotten or illswept. Here breathing calms. A tree stump older than the steam engine strikes, for a second, sunlight in its mossy hollow. Where rot succeeds to loam, a splintered branch of windfall jabs. Flagless pole, it quivers, marking a coordinate which now mostly bores. ASARCO's airborne plume casts a century's tumorous shadow -copper cadmium arsenic- from Ruston's clavicle to Vashon's chin. More than we, the Greeks understood a poison that might linger, but here no Machaon will salve Philoktetes' festering wound. Orcas passing through the bay, half your heroes gone, circle widely, when the seas diminish, emulate the octopus, whose arms grasp the Narrows bridge: seek out the secret places. Leaning back, I descend a driftwood colossus, wavetorn taproots flailing - how long they served, how hard to relinquish one's defense. The tang of ocean drops frozen from the air. On sand, I turn and see the giant, angled toward the sea, now unremarkable; dozens so fashioned test water. And I cannot decide if they are winter sunbathers or skiffs readying themselves for the sea.
© Copyright 2008, William J. Kupinse.
Please do not re–use them without permission.
