Friday 27 September 2024

Five Poems by Dennis Camire

 




Salmon Run

 

 

After three-thousand miles on the red eye 

                                           wrestling the jet stream’s endless currents  

of turbulence, he arrives at his dad’s funeral 

                                                      feeling like an enervated sockeye;  

and, like the fish amidst of an Eden of insects, 

                                            he doesn’t eat from the endless hot dishes 

gifted from friends and neighbours.  

                                           And seeking an opening for the eulogy,  

he scours his boyhood bedroom 

                                         then, finding that photo of them beaming  

with his first caught cutthroat, feels 

                                                   like a sea-run salmon who swims 

miles of shoreline before scenting the  

                                                        stream where he was conceived….   

No wonder the son comes to believe  

                                             He’s half man/ salmon as, in daydream, 

he can’t stop nosing into grief’s swift currents  

                                       of memories and seeing, in sorrow’s pink eyes, 

dying salmon. Now the man stays an extra day, 

                                                     hikes to the ancient salmon stream,  

and harvests a large male to fillet  

                                                    and dry in his dad’s old smoker.  

Retuned home, he thaws some red flesh 

                                                   when feeling lonely then feels for his dad’s 

gentle, fly-tying fingers in the bones.  

                                                   And when his boy turns ten, they begin 

The annual migration to the same stream 

                                             Where he feels succour over the son shinning 

And darting-- between rocks-- like a fingerling  

                                                    Fattening for an adult life of saltwater 

rife with famished seals and great whites. 

                                                     Here he praises the native American 

Salmon clans proofing there’s no separation 

                                                          Between man, salmon, and creator. 

Here he prays that these spruce-lined banks,  

                                         too, will hold so many memories of them  

frying rainbows inside cast iron before 

                                              a night of fishing tales and tender advice 

about wading into the waters of desire…. 

                                                       And may his future grief over my death, 

He thinks, be eased in him echoing to his son  

                                        my dad’s words on “the salmon gutted by grizzlies  

reincarnating their nitrogen into fir needles  

                                                and bald eagle wings swimming the breeze.”  

And may I, too, pass when the stream is rife 

                                          with these circle-of-life fish in the shallows  

so, inconsolable, he might too scoop up a dying  

                       male, smoke the flesh, and, eating each future fillet,  

feel the salmon running his bloodstream’s miles  

                                     of winding tributaries until realizing his heart’s own  

vast, magnificent watershed of the living and the dead. 

 

 

 

 

 

Saving the Seed Saver’s Story 

--Inspired, in part, by Anthony Doer’s story, Village 123--

 

 

Hearing her praise “saving seeds 

Preparing the raised bed of my head 

To sprout with the notion that my dying body 

Might simply be like a seed whose decom- 

Posing leads to lush, budding leaves,” 

soon her nurses feed on this succour 

being sown in her last days. And when 

 

some are inspired to write down 

“Seeds are both cradle and grave—in- 

carnation and bardo state”—they learn 

of their desire for her words to dry, harden 

and scatter over memory’s own layers of loam 

so that one, now, after mini stroke, doesn’t 

think it’s all over as she muses on 

 

“some winter squash seeds evolving 

to sweeten their fruit in the growing cold 

after first frost.” And another recent divorcee 

foresees love still sprouting at her age as she 

thinks of “those stored pyramid seeds budding 

thousands of years after being entombed 

beside the brute of King.” And how, now, 

 

not to Johnny-Apple-seed her story 

As we learn of a third blessed nurse 

Comforting those fearing “Purgatory’s 

Prolonged, fiery purification with the tale 

of those sweet, calloused melon seeds first 

Having to pass through a bird intestine so 

the fibrous husk softens enough to bud.” 

 

Yes, “seed,” now, how it ends with them 

setting dying dandelions bedside to remind her 

of those “skeletal seed blooms’ sublime ascension 

coming from the air rising through its falling 

filaments of parachute forming a vortex 

wafting them up to five miles;” Or, work, 

into the duff of your consciousness, 

 

how she leaves her meth-addled girl 

with a handful of lovely protea seeds 

whose beauty, she heeds, “only germinates 

into being after they’re exposed to the 

wildfire’s searing heat.“ Or transplant 

into your heart’s soft peat pot how 

more than one of them hovers over 

 

the casket’s shrivelled-up body 

(curving into an o) and blesses her 

beloved, dying, tumble weeds “shrink- 

ing into an oval’s, off-road tire so,  

 In death, they roll miles scattering  

The protein-packed, flowers-to-be-  

seeds over an endless desert….” 

                                                                      

 

 

  

Winter Rhododendrons

  

 

After famished deer foraged  

The buds donning dormancy’s  

sleeping caps of snow, I mourned  

 

losing May’s boon of blooms  

tossing their pink and purple bouquets  

to the eager bridesmaids of bees— 

 

though each spring morning, my gaze 

sought out the phantom flora  

the way amputees feel for the missing  

 

limb. How to sate this hunger for beauty  

if eyes can’t buffet on the banquet of blossoms 

served up on its own plate of petals? 

 

But in June, some deer from that winter feast froze 

in my gravel drive to display the lost flowers  

of May’s lawn transmigrated into fawns  

 

blooming lovely white carnations of dots  

alongside their black-eyed Susan eyes  

until it seemed like a fair trade as I admired 

 

their neck’s white-lily-stripes soon transforming  

into the spider-mum-like petals of coyote pups’ ears  

nursed by the mother who’ll take the fawn down.  

 

And so, I planted even more rhododendrons  

to fuel beauty’s own, eternal Grateful Dead tour 

in the porcupine’s Venus fly trap of a back 

 

sown from that dead coyote’s bones he chews  

through the winter before the fisher cat  

disembowels the brown hair flower of his belly  

 

to reveal the soul of rhododendron  

in her clematis-like teeth I later see blooming  

in my steel trap’s bite so that I sense the presence  

 

of that winter doe’s warm, ravenous tongue  

as I bud to sing of everything I see  

of beauty, everything I love.





 

Post-Stroke Star Gazing

 

 

Resting my light sensitive eyes  

                          on the night sky’ flat screen 

                                  shooting stars suddenly bleed through  

                                                              Andromeda’s grey matter of brain   

 

So, tonight, a heavenly body seems 

                         to be suffering her own mini stroke 

                                                      while meteor showers, possibly,  

                                                                            are the galaxy’s grand mal seizures  

 

in damaging Thor and Zeus’s auras. 

                        For a while, as I gaze at the Pleiades,  

                                             I’m slowly MRI-ing the mind  

                                                                           of God—or Nature’s sublime  

 

   evolutionary design--to espy Mar’s 

                                    emerging mind of light blurred, 

                                                            sometimes, by the asteroids  

                                                                     That clot her orbit. Oh, what delight  

 

 to Cat scan Cassiopeia to espy 

                          the seizures of shooting stars  

                                            burning a Godly, celestial body 

                                                         to her demise!  And what divine 

 

consolation in ex-raying,  

                      with telescope, Sirius’s occipital lobe 

                                                    of distant galaxy for the aneurysms  

                                                                              of exploding supernovas proving 

 

my stroke-dimmed galaxy of neurons  

                            doesn’t mean I’m out of harmony 

                                              with some grand celestial order!  

                                                              But, yes, there’s still grief over 

                                                                                   

The eye pain from a bright screen 

                and the rings from power lines returning 

                                         that bewitching high pitch before 

                                                           the pop and brief numbness 

 

of my nose.  But now, I return inside,  

                                   shut lights, and feel my mind 

                                                                northern light with delight 

                                                                    over the tiny particle of plaque 

 

  loosed into my occipital lobe’s solar system 

                            so like those rogue comets fated to crash 

                                           into blue-green planets and illumed 

                                                                       temporal lobes of moons.  

 

Still, I will let the fleeting light  

                       of these thoughts flash across 

                                    the cosmos of my consciousness  

                                                    even though the heart’s star will soon 

                                                                           

 dim and smoulder into the black hole 

                                  of death or not knowing 

                                                  for see, now, how the firmaments affirm 

                                                              there’s no border between head and heaven— 

 

consciousness and cosmos—so if I don’t go 

                      gently into that good night, I’ll still be consoled 

                                                       knowing, like those heavenly bodies, 

                                                                       that I’m dying by giving away my last light. 

 

 

 

 

 

Upon Learning that Half my Body’s Atoms Formed Beyond the Milky Way and Travelled to our Solar System on Intergalactic Winds Driven by Exploding Stars

 

 

Though I know the science linking full moons 

to emergency rooms and meteor showers to dreams, 

 

such a learning curve to imagine my essence  

is literally from the Greek ethers  

 

and how burning supernovas were celestial storks,  

of sorts, delivering me to earth. Now quantum entanglement—  

 

(across time and space)—explains why those break-ups, 

 decades ago, ache like a black hole of desolation….  

 

No wonder, this alien, cone head upon emerging  

from birth’s mother ship of hips!  No wonder this 

 

 body’s awkward space suit inhibiting the 

walking of happiness’s own gravity-free surface  

 

often sprinkled, too, with the moon-dust of lust!  

Instead, to grasp my origin I’ll have to Fed ex my genes  

 

to some Astrology.com in cyberspace to fathom  

how many light years back my extended star-cluster clan  

 

migrated to earth’s open, blue portal. Or, better yet,  

I’ll take a course in Human Astronomy and Physiology  

 

to discover constellations like Zeus and Thor are more  

like Ex-rays than projected wishes and myths  

 

of the primitive.   But, oh, what a space mission awaits  

where knowing thyself requires gazing into those  

 

celestial sonograms of nebula bathing in the  

amniotic fluid of swirling, light galaxies!  

 

Mornings, now, I emerge from sleep’s space shuttle  

to, possibly, make some giant leap by singing  

 

of my ten billion miles of DNA spiralling inside  

not like galaxies nineteen-thousand light years wide!  

 

And already it feels like some breakthrough for humanity 

to see our revised family tree’s primates preceded by  

 

bright profiles of planets from the Pleiades….  

Until adapting to being the very stuff of the stars 

 

maybe we’ll evolve beyond the genocide that seems  

to be in our genes; and it might all be moon-landing reverie  

 

if we muse, exclusively, on our mortal dust being  

from solar systems that worshipped suns; 

 

and if we meditate on these interstellar atoms  

of the body over our atom bomb creations; and if  

 

we can create the like urgency to finally colonize  

the heart’s still too-distant, red planet of Mars. 

 

 

 

 




Dennis Camire is the author of the poetry collection,  Anthology of Awe and Wonder(Deerbrook Editions, June, 2024) and Combed by Crows (Deerbrook Editions) and teaches writing at Central Maine Community. The former director of Maine Poetry Central and the founder of The Portland Poet Laureate Program, his work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Lothlorien Review, Alluvium, Amethyst, Café Review,  Canary, Hamilton Stone Review, Speckled Trout Review and on Maine Public Radio. He lives in an A-frame in West Paris, Maine.



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