from Fresh Water

in memory of Nicholas Ferrar Hughes, 1962-2009

Mayflies

Where are we going tonight with our fine-meshed nets
and sampling grabs? Into the rain of all rivers, and the sea
of all weathers. Our jeep does the graft of our feet.
We rev and jerk down the tracks on the back of a planet.
River and banks are an interchangeable blackout. We proceed
by feel so as not to light alarm. We drag the riverbed out,
capsize its stone babies on our sampling tray, then ignite
their whole world in unravelling, incinerating light.

It is night’s nursery below stunned stones on the stream’s bed
where even the darkness is felt in minuscule spirals
that swirl from the larval mayfly’s feelers: a code,
unmade from sand grain and rain and particles
that swerve through this under-space like quiet comets,
each considered and caught or flung on a fresh trajectory.

 

Alaskan Salmon

An angler casting in line with the fish’s cast. His wrist halts,
top-locking the reel—a fist freezing over another live fist—
until the water’s worn door slaps open on its hasps …
Salmo salar—those lights that leapt from the solar flare
of a mid-Atlantic lighthouse; that swum—or strummed
to landfall with rumours of petrels—of shearwaters
pashed against the spun sun of that high prism.

To landfall—to riverfall, then waterfall—a slown, sure
skimming stone on ladders of sheered water:
those envoys of an oceanic storm, Salmo salar,
coiling against arcing voltages of an Alaskan river,
springing at their height like bending wands
casting themselves towards its spawning grounds,
plashing gradients until they nose the river’s birthing vaults.