" Wolf " " Salmon "

"Wolf"

An eternal epitome
Of the Northwest’s timeless freedom -
Pristine and elemental
Brutal and beautiful
As the earth’s history itself,
Made manifest and woven
By the endless matrices
of rivers and streams,
And fed by the hydro-genesis
and full moons
Of snow-melted Millenniums
And the epiphany
of the many midnights
Of the ageless howl of the wolf
And the water’s wellspring rush
To alma-matered and acqua-bellied lakes...

"Salmon"

Five year salmon
Jeweled and gemmed
And king fish crowned
Returning full loop to Puget Sound
Through endless and oceaned pools of loss,
Having left behind those several many
Strewn about in cruel seasons of storms
and caught in the rivers’ thatch
They swell and swollen to hatch,
Circling back from sea wide odyssey,
Carrying the genetic banner of honor
Missioned before the millennia of sunrises,
Anteceded before the rivers sculpted
The rock and stone
From the many long times ago,
An unending passion
Fulfilled and quenched
in spawned-out endings
From thrusts of life
of all the young to come
Expatriated in halves-of-decades
And the pain-sweet circle of birth
And travels of travail
To homecomings of tattered ecstasy
Piqued in memories
of aqua-mapped topography,
These noble cousins
Of old elephants
Wandering away to die -
Of three score and ten,
Alaskan men
Pushed off for their one-way
Canoe ride to future blessings
And ancient dreams enroute
To the sweetbitter noblesse oblige’
Of down-side-up joie de vivre’
And the last ride home
From wayward boundings -
Salmon and man
And the homings and roamings
Of feathered minions -
Hawks and Swallows Capistrano,
Pacific Groved and Monarched Butterflies
And ghost flocks of Passenger Pigeons,
In the rhythmic and staccatoed cadence
Of ancestral journeys
Spread splendorous
Across the dawnings of time...