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2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Bill Yake

Bill Yake’s poetry springs largely from place (the Pacific Northwest), wild nature, and water. After stints as a forest fire–fighter, fire lookout in Glacier National Park, and laborer, he worked as an environmental scientist for Washington State Department of Ecology for 24 years. For the past nine years he has lived with his wife, Jeannette Barreca, just north of Olympia on the verge of Green Cove Creek Ravine—its forest a century into regrowth.

Bill’s poetry has received Alligator Juniper’s national poetry prize (2003) and the inaugural James Snydal Prize from Fine Madness (2004). His poems have been published widely in literary magazines (Willow Springs, Puerto del Sol, The Seattle Review, Rattle), in magazines serving the environmental community (Wilderness, Wild Earth, The Bear Deluxe), and in anthologies (Under a Silver Sky: An Anthology of Pacific Northwest Poetry, March Hares: Best Poems from Fine Madness). After three chapbooks, his first full-length collection of poetry, This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain, was recently published by Radiolarian Press (2004).

Praising the Fish

You are the visible whispering one.

The Brahmin. You are the flush of blood

behind a thin skin of mirrors. Your scales

are small as single notes. Rainbow above all

rainbows, you are jaw and composure.

At sunset your tail is broad. It propels

you up glistening into burning skies,      

gills pulsing and nose to the wind as if

it were current. It is

the way wheat-land sunsets burn rivers.

In the flash behind flesh and the blush under

cutbanks, you are the rainbow of horizon,

thunderhead, creek braid and plunge pool.

You are frost turning the sun green.

And buoyed by an aspirated clarity—

all this air within water within air—

you are a towering splash of hunger,

our flourishing, transient shout.

(Originally published in Samsara Quarterly)

Poem for Tokeland Eroding

The sea hisses at the lifted land;

erases, wave by wave, our footing

and the slap of a flat rain stiffens.

The bay is naming itself Willapa,

inhaling two fathom tides

over insubstantial sand.

Storm surf steepens the beach,

tears out trees, stretches

the grey beach north,

and sends two crab boats down.

The winter, the sea, they do what they want—

slam dance with the headland,

set steel roofs to hum and moan,

drop double-wides into the huge thump

as swells collapse; lick and slice

the westering highway off.

Sand, too transient for maps to name,

and seaward—shoalwater—not even ink,

but gaps in charts, accidentals,

the tug of a hidden moon swung hard

against horizons: bathymetry

ceaselessly shifted by great storms.

(Originally published in Wilderness Magazine)