Orca

ORCA He erupts from the water in a triumphant roll, slicing moist air with his black fins and tail, disappearing once more in an explosion of diamonds as salt spray and sun He arrives every year when this warm bay is pregnant, giving birth to new stories of survival and death The epitome of orca, his warm-blood intelligence maneuvers like a spirit through the muscular restlessness of heaving gray seas that are the waters of his days, where he’s powerful and elusive gliding through the ocean like the shadow of a presence in the absence of light where he’s fluid and flexible, always solid and smooth, as if the structure of stone might be hydrodynamic, somehow shaping and shaped by the contours of water curving over his body, carrying the chatter of echolocation and revealing his dorsal as a signature in black, that gray whale and great shark, and all else who might dare, know the orcas are back, that the family of the owner is in residence once more Emanuel Carter