October Salmon

He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,
Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning
small oak,
Half-under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests,
Breathing in that lap of easy current
In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight,
Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –
But already a veteran,
Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!
Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s
beauty-dress,
Her life-robe –
Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,
Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –

An autumnal pod of his flower,
The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,

With the sea-going Aurora Borealis of his April power –
The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –
Ripened to muddy dregs,
The river reclaiming his sea-metals.

In the October light
He hangs there, patched with the leper-cloths.

Death has already dressed him
In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,
Mapping the completion of his service,
His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body
A fungoid anemone of canker –

Can the caress of water ease him?
The flow will not let up for a minute.

What change! from that covenant of Polar Light
To this shroud in a gutter!
What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!
His living body become death’s puppet,
Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes
He haunts his own staring vigil
And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,
And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is,
That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree,
hour after hour,
That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,
And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty
In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,
Body simply the armature of energy
In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,
The salt mouthful of actual existence
With strength like light –

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.
This chamber of horrors is also home.
He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy
channel of minnows
Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles
And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.
People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.
If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom,
so patient
In the machinery of heaven.

An Eel

The strange part is his head.  Her head.  The strangely ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment.  Lobed glands
Of some large awareness.  Eerie the eel’s head.
This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.
Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,
The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,
Undershot predatory.  And the iris, dirty gold
Distilled only enough to be different
From the olive lode of her body,
The grained and woven blacks.  And ringed larger
With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye
Behind her eye, paler, blinder,
Inward. Her buffalo hump
Begins the amazement of her progress.
Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession
To fish-life – secretes itself
Flush with her concealing suit: under it
The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel
As her belly is, a dulled pearl.
Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberized weave
Of her insulation.  Her whole body
Damascened with identity.  This is she
Suspends the Sargasso
In her inmost hope.  Her life is a cell
Sealed from event, her patience
Global and furthered with love
By the bending stars as if she
Were earth’s sole initiate.  Alone
In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,
The nun of water.

Low Water

This evening
The river is a beautiful idle woman.

The day’s August burn-out has distilled
A heady sundowner.
She lies back. She is tipsy and bored.

She lolls on her deep couch. And a long thigh
Lifts from the flash of her silks.

Adoring trees, kneeling, ogreish eunuchs
Comb out her spread hair, massage her fingers.

She stretches—and an ecstasy tightens
Over the skin, and deep in her gold body

Thrills spasm and dissolve. She drowses.

Her half-dreams lift out of her, light-minded
Love-pact suicides. Copulation and death.

She stirs her love-potion—ooze of balsam
Thickened with fish-mucus and algae.

You stand under leaves, your feet in shallows.
She eyes you steadily from the beginning of the world.