(desire)

Salmon Run, Kagawong, September 2013

1.

Lovers who met in our forties, we decided not to have a child.

A year later, we hold hands along this teeming river, where the cold

is already prying a few flushed leaves from the maples.

I want my wife's breasts. She undoes a button and takes my hands

into the warmth under her clothes, against the living skin,

and I waver near regret, never knowing if the choice was wisdom

or cowardice, unwilling to risk chaos, unwilling to pay the time,

our melancholy, grown-up caution before the violence of desire ---

but, as if her body were knowledge, I touch

her beside this water and tell myself I know our child,

curled hank of vein and bone swimming through her

that would have knotted our temporary blood to all this falling and surge.

2.

I have never seen this before:

the traveled fish thrash uphill,

stubborn as hammered spikes,

hovering to fan their gills

in the lucid pools, then bursting out,

tails beating the ice-water

over ruffling shoals,

urgent toward reproduction

and death. When one loses

its grip on the water, the current

sweeps it far back, until it catches

somehow and climbs again,

each a thick, single-minded

sleeve of flesh pulsing

like a horse's thigh muscle.

The untiring, convulsive salmon

whip themselves over

the slick, algae-green stones,

against the also stubborn

invisible current, yellow-

black ripples of shimmer and

thrust --- or, each a fist

clenched on roe or milt,

they punch a tunnel through water

to quiet where they will gasp

and drop their milky heat

into the dangerous chill of this world.