Paul Fisher’s first book, Rumors of Shore, is the winner of the 2009 Blue Light Book Award, and is forthcoming in 2010. Recent poems appear in Cave Wall, the Centrifugal Eye, Disquieting Muses Quarterly Review, Kakalak 2009 Anthology of Carolina Poets, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, 2010 Poet’s Guide to New Hampshire, Slow Trains, Snow Monkey, Umbrella, Waccamaw, and various other publications. Paul is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Fellowship in Poetry from the Oregon Arts Commission, and a graduate of the MFA program at New England College. He lives in the northwest corner of Washington State, near the Alaska Ferry System’s southern terminus, and cannot see Russia from his house.
Baggage lost, rains wrung dry,
stories scoured by whims of air,
I arrive a stranger
worn thin by voyaging,
by wondering and warring,
by my tribe’s sixty-thousand-year march.
Has my scroll of rivers
unwound to its end?
I ask, but no one living knows.
The map to my village?
Nowhere found.
Grandmother elephant refuses to say
where she has carried
the bones of my name.
Baobab’s broad back shields me from sun
while wind-through-tall-grass
whispers, Here!, but whirls on.