Читать книгу The Anti-Grief - Marianne Boruch - Страница 7

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Salmon

How salmon love

sex enough to fight uphill in waters blasting

brilliant, some

one hundred mph (fact-checkers,

forget it, I’m close). How we stood, old inkling

of such exhausting omg, Darwin

would have… (the difference, same-

thingness, animal hungers and fury and persistence,

some amazing something next)

exploded!—his head

on a pillow most afternoons in the parlor, wrapped

in her quiet concern. Emma, the perfect nurse, they say,

who married the perfect patient,

Victorian fable, velvet-striped wallpaper even

on the ceiling would be my guess.

Because that trip he took in youth is

everlasting youth, island of

huge tortoises and the tiny cactus finch

plus his other

green spot in the sea, its DNA trace

of the grand extinct dodo

too trusting to run from sailors with their clubs, too weird

and bigger, certainly more

feathered and blank-eyed than one impossible

irreplaceable Great Uncle Cedric

I heard of, just wanting a little honest-to-god

barbecue at the wedding.

The forces of life

are mysterious. But thrilling

and painful, August in Alaska near

Seward, gone up in a firestorm during

the quake, 1964, any year in a fade next to our

stunned standing at the salmon weir,

a patch of woods, sunlit river

raging, those bright muscle-creatures blown back

at it at it leaping, failing spectacular

upstarts all over again

human. What it means to

love is speechless.

The Anti-Grief

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