Death in Motion

We met there,
In a forest of others.
I closed my eyes and reached for a black stone submerged in the dark water;
Sometimes black is so delicately constructed.
But with my touch the explosion of gunfire flashed.
Then I could hear and smell more clearly the death and life of shotgunned ducks,
of the disgusting jubilance of destruction: when the hunter injects the heroin
of the not-being-prey.

let them pretend but not us:
the animal trembling is all around us,
in between the air of each shared breath

and no amount of canyon-yelling or
other-killing will quench it

the dark forest world:
the rush of birds flushed out
just before the death-dive

what is it like to be comfortable in flight
then to plunge half-dead where nothing is centered upon you
like leaping into the pavement
from 20 stories but when you hit it is nothing but ordinary;
cheers even erupt - it's a celebration

and something beautiful has died in full motion:
nothing a photograph could hope to capture
but like a bird's beating heart,
slowly arcing downward to towards death.

you are beautiful you are beautiful

that is why they kill you
isn't it?

-Thomas Goss

Stones Speak of the Earthless Sky

Memory hasn't a chord of what the family has lost.
For centuries village ancestors potlached salmon's
return so we could dance on the water like bugs.

Today the stones quit asking not to betray
their ceremonies, our ears deaf to their winter
story of mountain, river, cormorant, red-flowering

currant. Our car tracks trample their children
who vanish down the street like moonlight
into gutters, our abbreviated hours.

Topaz stones brought us dream circles in order
to never forget where the earth's heart cracked,
our shadows became ant fodder; we laughed

like flies and drank the blood from mirrors.
Flint raised his arm to the hummingbird's
fragrances, healing our eyes, spiky as sea urchins.

We ground Flint to a machine that exploded
with roadkill floating in toxins.
From a cave, ancestor stones gave us the cells

of trout, madrona, butterfly, eagle and grizzly,
gave us our birth song born of the sea,
gave us eagle feathers for the sunrise dance.

We chose instead to shoot the spotted-owl
from its borderless clarity,
turn off life like a video, including ours.

-Duane Niatum