late spring wind sounds an ocean 
through new leaves. later the same 
wind sounds a tide. later still the dry 

sound of applause: leaves chapped 
falling, an ending. this is a process.
the ocean leaping out of ocean 

should be enough. the wind 
pushing the water out of itself;
the water catching the light

should be enough. I think this 
on the deck of one boat
then another. I think this 

in the Salish, thought it in Stellwagen
in the Pacific. the water leaping 
looks animal, looks open mouthed,

looks toothed and rolling;
the ocean an animal full 
of other animals.

what I am looking for doesn’t matter.
that I am looking doesn’t matter.
I exert no meaning.

a juvenile bald eagle eats 
a harbor seal’s placenta.
its head still brown. 

this is a process. the land 
jutting out, seals hauled out,
the white-headed eagles lurking 

ready to take their turn at what’s left.
the lone sea otter on its back,
toes flopped forward and curled;

Friday Harbor: the phone booth
the ghost snare of a gray whale’s call; 
an orca’s tooth in an orca’s skull

mounted inside the glass box. 
remains. this is a process. 
three river otters, two adults, a pup, 

roll like logs parallel to the shore. 
two doe, three fawns. a young buck 
stares, its antlers new, limned gold 

in sunset. then the wind again: 
a wave through leaves green 
with deep summer, the walnut’s 

green husk. we are alive in a green 
crashing world. soon winter. 
the boat forgotten. the oceans,

their leaping animal light, off screen.
past. future. this is a process. the eagles 
at the river’s edge cluster 

in the bare tree. they steal fish 
from ducks. they eat the hunter’s 
discards: offal and lead. the juveniles 

practice fighting, their feet tangle 
midair before loosing. this 
is a process. where they came from. 

for how long will they stay. 
that I am looking doesn’t matter. 
I will impose no meaning.

If you really see the Caribbean archipelago, you will see yourself,
the vivid scattered islands stirring to awakening in a sea of reverie and nightmare,
the goldening light lifting green foliage out of darkness into its illumination
and the surrounding blue immensity brooding an unknown creaturing of what can live only in depth

If you hear the Caribbean archipelago, you will hear it talking to you in tongues
of the original tribes of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia; you will hear quarrelling, then a blur
and you will hear the simultaneous translation of these languages into the first language,
the sea talking to itself because in the beginning and the end there is no other

If you truly see the Caribbean archipelago, it will become clear
how the fragmented, brittle arc of islands, resisting the onsurge of ocean, makes the sea the sea;
how the ocean, reaching around breached rock, trying to rejoin itself, makes islands islands;
how they both therefore define each other, how they refine your understanding of the selfhood
into an acceptance of the necessary oneness of the known and the unknown

If you can be the Caribbean archipelago, acknowledging that your littoral shape is never final,
that it shifts with your awareness that below the sublunary rise-and-ebb there is an undertow,
a contrary flow that draws you down, deepening to where the separate i-lands reach
beyond the scattered stones of their selves, growing down back into one bedrock, into the original
ground from which the sea, the ocean, the self-dismembered yet defining archipelago rise into their being,
if you can be this, be yond it, you will miracle into impossibility, you will see
how to be broken and yet whole.