last week the front page of your local
newspaper showed orcas breaking
through ocean’s mottled skin, just off
the shatter of shoreline. the large island
and your small town. the ocean breathing
in on all sides and around 8500
residents of that small town, gasping
and rattling in the delighted sky, this postage stamp
of land. old growth forest cathedrals snug
up against the soaring sides, muscled mountain
shoulders in the occasionally thin clear air, they startle
with emerald green alpine meadow, wandering
off into their purple shadow valleys. a few days, maybe
a week, prior to marine mammal front page
photographed feature, a picture of a statue. a statue
of a man long-dead, though his name still ringing
like bronze bell. in these scattered parts
of holy hungry ghosts roaming muscled
mountain monuments. we enter old growth cathedrals
and hear brown bear parishioner
supplicating in slippered feet. the ringing
bell no longer reaching our ears, we feel it
in the struggle of our blood. and this front page small
town newspaper with the whales, killing, and a few
days prior, that dead man forced to forever
sit in a parking lot. the human is an odd
and wobbling creature, deifying killers and killing
whales. and this statue, haunting and covered in bird
shit, the newspaper photo showed it receiving
a cleaning. a crown cleaned of animal waste
to restore honor to the man locked in unyielding
rigor. those birds, they can fly! and this man, he cannot
even breathe in his uniform of stricture. this statue
is in a tiny smear of a parking lot, a calamity
of concrete, wedged up against sprawling
cathedrals of old growth, mountains of quiet
magnitude, monuments to this living planet.
walk down out of these monuments, through the cathedrals
with their devout inhabitants, and find yourself
at ocean’s edge. look into the breathing sea and feel
the humming heart of this planet, spinning.
statues of ore find freedom in the fires of their melting. they
are cast into bells, their howling transformed
into a warm hum.
zakschafer.com 