Marianne Boruch

Poem

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, the samethingness, animal hungers and fury and persistence, the belief, 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 that 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 barbeque 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.