Helping Sing the Salmon Home

Last weekend I had the honor of reading one of my poems as part of a poetry anthology called I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State, the brainchild of Rena Priest, Washington’s 2021-23 poet laureate. Rena Priest is “a Lhaq’temish woman—a member of the Lummi Nation…a salmon people.” It’s hard to imagine anyone more suited to the task of bringing such a book into being. She sought poems from every corner of the state, producing with partners at Empty Bowl Press a living testament of human ardor for a supremely impressive and threatened creature.

My honor was double in that my poem, I Went Looking for the Wild One, was selected to lead off the collection. It’s not because my poem is any better than others (the collection is chock-full of excellent poetry) but because of the story it tells, describing my frustration years ago when, seeing the biosphere collapsing around me, I noted a disturbing lack of outcry, even in the poetry journals of that time. Meanwhile, there was the scientist, tracking the collapse up close and in tragic detail, needing to shout alarm but imprisoned by scientific norms of language and behavior.  It was a disconnect I felt, a walling off of human experience in all its range from the very real sufferings of the Earth.

Perhaps Rena wanted the anthology to leap past the stuck configuration of silence my poem described, placing it at the beginning as a kind of weir for the others to leap over, which they do, brilliantly. I Sing the Salmon Home is a book that leaps, from the luminescent blue cover which leaps at the eyes from whatever surface it lies upon to the poems themselves, which leap simultaneously at mind, heart, soul, and that place for which there are no words, but which drums in the body when one consider the epic, self-gifting journey that is a salmon’s passion.

Representing Whatcom and Skagit counties, the northwest corner of this broad and varied state, about 20 of us were signed up in alphabetical order by first name. I had already read most of the poems in the book, but now I got to hear them, each with the author’s own cadence and emphasis. I heard where throats caught on grief, hardened on anger, opened in awe. Suddenly I realized what I was hearing. It was the Wild One my poem went looking for. It was right there in each voice, wherever it scraped on sorrow, rage, disbelief, awe, hope. It’s a voice poets nurture but we all possess. It’s simply that part of us that rebels against desecration, that howls at the thought of losing the salmon.

Scientists have it too. Of course they do. They’re just bound by language and professional practice not to express it. But I wish they would. Nature can’t be seen through data alone, least of all such masterpieces as the Pacific Salmon: Chinook, Sockeye, Chum, Pink, Steelhead, Coho, Cutthroat. Such existences must be felt to be fully known. The value of measuring, dividing, counting and compiling is real, but can miss the deeper knowing available to us, which nature is always whispering at, when not loudly trumpeting from branches. That nature sings (and leaps) is part of our reality, a kind of fact, a substance of our experience. And we must sing it back. It’s part of the deal.

Just as scientists are helped by their own inner poet, so are poets helped by their own inner scientist. Poetry always gains when it drinks from the well of science, when it avails itself of the “glimmering details” otherwise known as facts. Such facts of nature, gold for a poet, glitter in I Sing the Salmon Home. We learn about the salmon’s otolith, a “tiny ear stone/chronicler of time and space,” and taste the names of the salmon life-cycle, “egg, alevin, fry, parr, smolt...” We learn that salmon don’t eat on their way upriver. “They metabolize their tissues, like a tree keeping warm/by burning it’s branches.” We enter time, travelling to “fifty million years ago, as subduction carried an archipelago/toward the continent in a slow-motion collision,” and are slapped into the perilous present as “a pacific salmon/jumps into a dataset.”

There is no single way to see a salmon, as we discover looking through the eyes of a sixteen year old boy fishing with his uncle, as suddenly a salmon floating toward him, “its broad sides glowing red/it’s single eye facing me/black, opaque, mysterious/rolls on its side and dies.” Salmon not only take us inside ourselves, they orient reality around us, turning rivers into “clear slipstream(s) of memory.” Memory is not a typical attribute given to water flowing by, but in salmon country it is everywhere. These poets see it. And they feel it.  “Dammed rivers/these teardrops/not enough.”

Ultimately, I Sing the Salmon Home is a generous book, in both spirit and matter. It’s properly fat, as salmon are meant to be, as are orcas, forests, rivers and salmonberries. Salmon are generosity’s living and dying exemplars, and the Lummi, like all salmon people, are renowned for their own generosity. Rena Priest, along with Empty Bowl Press and the many contributors, has brought that spirit forward in what is no ordinary book. It’s a gift.

Oh. Here’s my poem. (One note. The original version has the term “poor scientist.” Rena asked to change it to “poor salmon scientist,” which I was delighted to do. In honor of I Sing the Salmon Home, I am posting that version.)

I Went Looking for the Wild One

I went looking for the wild one, the howler, the vatic
tramp, the one for whom the wounded hillsides
are inner burns, whose blood is stained
with the old love-wine of poet and earth—
warrior poet, slinging battle flak out at the static,
shattering polite conversations everywhere.

I looked in the anthologies, listening for echoes, traced for
signs in the quarterlies, magazines, best-ofs. I learned it’s
been a good year for poetry, grants and awards coming in,
contests and prizes proliferating. The wise grey consensus
counsels a return to the classics.

Meanwhile, poor salmon scientist holds extinction
in a palmful of numbers
with nothing but data
to howl with.