Scott T. Starbuck

– for Shura Young Who Died April 27, 2011

The clear water

and empty nets

sleep until morning.

My fishing partner

and lover, Shura,

would have painted this.

Inside the lodge

pieces of fish stories

reach my ears –

I had her –

but she –

is gone.

 

Scott T. Starbuck‘s book River Walker, a collection of Pacific Northwest fishing poems, was recently published by Mountains and Rivers Press. His activist chapbook, The Other History, or unreported and underreported issues, scenes, and events of the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries, is forthcoming in November 2013 from FutureCycle Press. His anti-nuclear clay-poem, “Napali,” appeared in the Washington and Oregon chapters of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Particles on the Wall Exhibit in Portland, Oregon (May and June 2013) about the “lasting impacts of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the nuclear age.” Starbuck was a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island. Website: http://www.pw.org/content/scott_starbuck_1