If One Can Speak Seriously of the Sublime
Salmon travel the long ways, tails bent against gravity, noses hooked by shadow. Living trees vanish overhead into canopy and take salmon with them. Salmon climb into sky; they swim behind and through the trees and earth. They swim in fog, they are fog that passes into an open stump. Wood tastes tassels of the sea, miles away. Scales glitter on rough bark in the rainforest. Sea and fog are rain, are salmon.
It is hard to die. Salmon come to death through hunger for home that drives them through seas, up a creek, scraping their yellow skins. The harps of their bodies loll in the songs of a creek lost in woodland. Maple leaves spin down. All would be hungry but for this hunger of the salmon. Hunger of bears, of foxes, of crows, opossums, wood rats, voles, the beetles, flies, ants, the roots of fir and cedar, the diminishing minuscule creatures with their own hungers.
A hollow tree is a mouth that has already said what it knows.
Jayne Marek has published writings and art photos in Rattle, The New York Times, Salamander, Bloodroot, One, Chestnut Review, Typehouse, Northwest Review, Spillway, Eclectica, Calyx, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, she has been awarded two NEH fellowships for literary scholarship and nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Her six poetry collections include In and Out of Rough Water (2017) and The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling.
Header image by Beat J Korner, courtesy Shutterstock.
