17

Curious the resurrection

of bud burst and stem

in the round of seasons

I cannot help but watch

the sea water rise

and fall the harbor fill

and empty with the passage

of tankers which seem

to murmur the strange

psalms of capital as they

pass beneath the Lion’s Gate

and the lilacs might still

be blooming in the dooryards

of Delta where long trains of

containers snake to other deaths

less dramatic than pipelines

or tankers three times the size

of the Exxon Valdez its

honeysuckle heart the

rusting steel dream of

production’s fraught desire O

defenders of this long paddled

coast—beware this compost

of mind and matter this liberal

western ghost of soft change

soft rioting—behold as the

death we sought to thwart

arrives by other means

at the door of our endlessly

unconscious and unquenchable homes