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Poetry of Issue #7        Page 2

Tillicum

Bulbous bug-eyed sneers and scowls
of totem poles frighten toddlers
but get older children giggling.
Adults dangling cameras congeal
in laughing couples lined up
at a visitor’s center adorned
with a slightly cubist thunderbird
and paintings of animals adrift
in two-dimensional spirit worlds.

We’ve arrived by ferry, leaving
a wake that persists almost halfway
across Puget Sound. Windless,
the water’s too placid to quickly
forget our slow-forged passage.
Looking back, we locate the city
by the thrust of the Space Needle,
the other skyscrapers appearing
waist-deep in West Seattle’s hills.

I’d like to walk along the beach
all the way around Blake Island
so I can gasp its entirety
in both hands and give it a squeeze.
But you fear we’ll miss the ferry,
miss concluding the afternoon
at the hotel bar where fellow
academics perch like swallows
on a wire. Let’s walk far enough

to shed the crowd. All those cameras:
I don’t want to lose my soul
to perspective gone askew—
caught as collateral damage
in a bad photo. What does the tide
have to say to this island?
Let’s walk far enough to taste
the rotting seaweed, broken shells
clattering under our city shoes.


The Sound’s too blue to earn our trust,
so we have to explore its hemline,
a slurry of sand and foliage.
Driftwood lounges in massive chunks.
A few pieces look big enough
to carve into totem poles.
They tempt me to express myself
in grimaces blue as the water,
arbitrary as the island itself.

  William Doreski