Falcon Watching, Disney Point

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What I’d hiked to the highest point

on the island for, was to look down

at the hundred-year-old quarry

where sandstone blocks

bound for streets in Everett,

Tacoma, Seattle, were shaped

with special picks until concrete

made the industry moot,

but there it was, a peregrine,

having just caught a pigeon

guillemot in flight,

which was spectacular

enough, but then it drew

a series of loops in the air,

the way a calligrapher

might fall into a flourish

at the end-stroke of a letter,

or a jazz player find & follow

a riff in a sudden pulse

of clear-sighted joy, this

journeyman killer

seized & added a grace note

before settling at the cliff’s edge

out of sight behind a patch

of scrub oak, visible

through the leaves as only

brief disturbances of light.

.

.

Elk

Solstice, 2018

This was the year the elk swam

to the island, a stray bull turned out

of its Cascade herd & somehow

kicked its way across a mile of saltwater

currents. How could it not love

our unfenced gardens? It browsed

& trampled corn meant for the market

as well as the table, sampled cabbages,

nipped the tender tops of beets. Sightings

were rare, only a patch of hair going

away, a hurried blur in the brush. We knew it

mostly by its tracks & the wreckage

it left. Some farmers slept in their fields.

Flyers appeared on the post office board: Save

the elk! Others made jokes about wapiti

burgers. When he found his blueberries

mangled & the lower limbs of apples

& plums torn off in his orchard,

one neighbor leaned a shotgun by his door

& kept watch. It was only a few days

before he saw a giant shape step

into his lower field at dusk.

What he expected when he fired a shot

into the air was panic, but the elk only turned

slightly his way, the pale rack of antlers

warring with the dusky hair

of its neck, before flowing back

into the shadows of the woods:

light dark light dark light



Photo credit: peregrine falcon by Roy W. Lowe, US Fish & Wildlife Service (public domain)

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Samuel Green served as Washington’s first poet laureate from 2007-2009. His most recent collection is All That Might Be Done (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He lives on Waldron Island, in Washington’s San Juan Islands.