At least my friend Vivian is reading the blog and catching the typos. A couple of other friends have expressed interest in the radio show I did on salmon, which as I've already noted here is not available at the KUOW website. So I'll type out the other poem I read that was not my own (I also read three of my salmon poems, which is about all I've got--though I readily admit I can't compete with Kunitz.)
The initiating premise for my poems, in several cases, are Scott Chambers' photographs of dead salmon. He feels quite strongly (as do others) that salmon populations are imperiled by our hatchery system, which for years has pumped out farmed fish that compete with wild fish, thereby altering the gene pool and behavior of wild stock. This genetic and behavioral dilution (in addition to habitat alteration and outright loss) is at the crux of the salmon issue here in the Northwest, whose loudest political manifestation is probably the removal (or not) of dams along the Columbia River. Biologists have gone in and killed the hatchery fish along rivers in Oregon where wild stock restorations are being attempted. This, of course, has led to public outcry--when people have gone hiking and seen salmon being bludgeoned.
We also bludgeon salmon here in Olympia, or used to. Reproductive success is apparently better when you mix the eggs and milt artificially--at least that is the practice of hatcheries. The new Pushcart anthology contains the poem I've already mentioned, about this very activity ("Killing Salmon" by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana. I don't know him. He doesn't know his poem is here.)
I still wonder at the end of this poem, why Yurdana jumps to old movies. Artificiality meets artificiality, perhaps? So the letter in the wrong hands (in the movie) is also a reflection of how the fish have moved so far out of their natural context.
Killing Salmon
After five weeks it's difficult to see them, each like a shadow with
the same struggle and heft as the one it follows,
the swift, tapered moments nearly overlapping
as we wade into them, in pairs, after the net is pulled taut, one of us
stooping to find the muscled groove above the tail that's made for
the hand,
then twisting it up while sliding thumb and forefinger inside the
gills, holding it out and away from the body, while the other
delivers two quick blows behind the eyes with a length of steel pipe,
a shuddering, then a deep loosening
as it rides the conveyor up to the spawning room.
Those first days, their dramatic humps, the red and bruised greens
moving like a thunder storm across their bellies
kept us respectful and arrogant, believing we were an essential link
in their life cycle,
but now, every third day or so, one of us slips into a rage; maybe it's
a blunt snout ramming his shin, or the overgrown teeth snagging
his waders
that makes him climb, as each of us has climbed, the cement bank
of the holding pond, dragging the salmon behing him with more
anger
than long hours, miserable pay, and the agony of our lower backs
should allow,
fifteen second where everything wrong in his life exists in the body
of this fish,
and he kneels, jaws clenched, ears gone red, swinging the steel pipe
again and again until it is unrecognizable'
and afterward, before his breathing slows, he tries to tell himself he
didn't enjoy it, that it wasn't satisfying, but back in the pond
he's a little embarrassed, a little afraid, and it lingers
like the nightmares he used to wake from on those quiet summer
nights from back home,
trembling in the bathroom, washing his face under the startling light
or catching the tail end of an old black and white late-night
movie,
where two lovers suffered over a whisper out of context, a letter in
the wrong hands, a message never delivered on which the entire
plot rests,
simple and reassuring, mistakes he'd made a dozen times, misun-
derstandings he could understand and carry with him back into
sleep.
