The comfort of smolder tendrils over red flesh—
a salmon, deboned and fileted and arranged
atop a steel rack, gradually, ardently, inflames.
The poet chooses alder wood fresh from the edge
of Alsop Pond, the one the tree’s been sucking
as it spills its yellow catkins into April’s rain.
Cut into kindling, the timber bleeds red sap,
pleads once again to be a warrior shield or bowl,
but its destiny is to burn today and feed.
This poet does believe the first man sprang alive
from an alder tree long ago—both dripping blood.
A man who would trace to her, who would provide.
Sweet, wet, greenwood smokes what will nourish,
cures the rawness of an ocean into edible bits
the way the early crocuses soften a cold winter.
Caught in the smudge of a blackened alder’s soot,
the salt of the Atlantic is preserved, and the vigor
of muscle remains. The fish’s migratory perseverance
can retell a poet’s own history of resolve.
There lies the wisdom of the salmon—its story—
fluid-transparent, elusive, shadowy at best,
then, a clean evisceration, its skin pink, green, silver.
It’s been sacrificed to the hardened steel and fire,
but it’s still able to speak ancestral myths. Truths.
Through burned-blood fog, this is what the poet bites.
