Downhill, a skeleton of an orcasuspended: a female beached; belly full,at that time, of seal and fish; the seal and fishfull, at that time of poison. The volunteer,white bob, soft face, knew too the desireto see a body—its echoes—suspended.Hope, the name given to a dead whale oncelocated by clicks and whistles in echoin inlet in open sea. The volunteertells me she visited the National Museumof African American History and Culture,says, The saddest part, to me,the Emmett Till—do you know him?—exhibit.The whale, killer, weakened by a scaffoldof old poison: DDT, PCBs,which no prey can process but holds in its fatits tissues its soft parts. See her Southernscaffold: Mississippi, Alabama,Georgia. See, I hadn’t thought to thinkof him here, under the reconstructedskeleton I had come to see, and onceseen, to mourn. She wanted to stand overhis bones, his grave on her bucket list.She pushed into me her desire,the sound surfacing what had, long ago,leached into my softest parts. I wantedto hold her shoulders, vomit into her mouththis water full of dead or dying,to fill her with a little knowing,change her, heavy her, let the knowing washher into the Salish at low tide, past driftwoodand eel grass, hope a warning at her back.