Poem for Friday and Issaquah Salmon

Salmon
By Jorie Graham

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the eye
is helpless
when the image forms itself, upside-down, backward,
driving up into
the mind, and the world
unfastens itself
from the deep ocean of the given. . . . Justice, aspen
leaves, mother attempting
suicide, the white night-flying moth
the ants dismantled bit by bit and carried in
right through the crack
in my wall. . . . How helpless
the still pool is,
upstream,
awaiting the gold blade
of their hurry. Once, indoors, a child,
I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds,
a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,
climb onto each other,
on the terrace floor,
and ride—two gold currents
wrapping round and round each other, fastening,
unfastening. I hardly knew
what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world
it was the one each cast
onto the other,
the thin black seam
they seemed to be trying to work away
between them. I held my breath.
As far as I could tell, the work they did
with sweat and light
was good. I'd say
they traveled far in opposite
directions. What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
the air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time
where it is useless, merely
beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance
one from the other
and slept, outstretched,
on the warm tile
of the terrace floor,
smiling, faces pressed against the stone.

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For some utterly unknown reason, my computer has decided that the third time reinstalling Windows 10 from a recovery drive is the charm. I did nothing different this time around, but the computer has currently upgraded itself to Windows 11 and let me install Photoshop and various other programs. So my advice if you have a problematic computer is to tell it loudly that you are throwing its fucking self off an upper floor balcony, and hopefully it will also listen. 

That part of my Friday was good, along with walking to the beach in cooler weather and watching the penultimate episode of Billions, which better end with Prince's wife blowing up everything because he deserves to get it from his nearest and dearest rather than from Chuck and Axe. The baseball part of my day was not great, especially since both teams I was rooting for blew it at the end of the game, but hey, it's just sports. Issaquah Salmon Hatchery during Salmon Days: