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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