Yesterday I did my radio blab on the Bardo project, which is a loose coalition of a few folks who are interested in writing about photographs that a man named Scott Chambers took--the photos are of dead salmon. I have a few dead salmon poems, and Kim Addonizio has a rather nice one that I did not get to read on the air. Eventually my reading will be archived at kuow.org but it is not there now because of some problem caused by Garrison Keillor that I did not understand.



I did read a poem by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana--"Killing Salmon" is in the new Pushcart Collection. In it, a fisheries worker goes postal on a salmon (after hearing me read it, a friend called to say that he felt this was emotionally inauthentic.)



But the mother of all salmon poems is by Stanley Kunitz. I admire this poem so much that I will also offer my critique: I don't like the places where the poem waxes metaphysical ("the only dance is love"--surely that is not true. It reminds me of Auden's "we must love one another or die"--which he renounced.)



Where Kunitz's poem gets it right is where it offers its concise and exactly accurate depictions of the death processes of the fish--one of the great biological spectacles on which this country is founded. And its strategy of positing some mode of human understanding, then denying that we can possess it, also seems like an accurate summary of our dumbfoundedness when we are confronted with this spectacle each year.



King of the River



If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

till you paint them

with your belly's blood:

Finned Ego

yard of muscle that coils,

uncoils.



If the knowledge were given you,

but it is not given,

for the membrane is clouded

with self-deceptiions

and the iridescent image swims

through a mirror that flows,

you would surprise yourself

in that other flesh

heavy with milt,

bruised, battering toward the dam

that lips the orgiastic pool.



Come. Bathe in these waters.

Increase and die.



If the power were granted you

to break out of your cells,

but the imagination fails

and the doors of the senses close

on the child within,

you would dare to be changed,

as you are changing now,

into the shape you dread

beyond the merely human.

A dry fire eats you.

Fat drips from your bones.

The flutes of your gills discolor.

You have become a ship of parasites.

The great clock of your life

is slowing down,

and the small clocks run wild.

For this you were born.

You have cried to the wind

and heard the wind's reply:

"I did not choose the way,

the way chose me."

You have tasted the fire on your tongue

till it is swollen black

with a prophetic joy:

"Burn with me!

The only music is time,

the only dance is love."



If the heart were pure enough,

but it is not pure,

you would admit

that nothing compels you

any more, nothing

at all abides,

but nostalgia and desire,

the two-way ladder

between heaven and hell.

On the threshold

of the last mystery

at the brute absolute hour,

you have looked into the eyes

of your creature self,

which are glazed with madness,

and you say

he is not broken but endures,

limber and firm

in the state of his shining,

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,

from which he is banished

forever.