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Stream Salmonid Ecology

I’ve got my guy, a pal in my department
at the university, and my girlfriend loves me
to death. A life in Fairbanks, far from London
the cradle I slept in, the coiled towel under
the door as my mother ended her life.
I’m not much into poetry. Frieda is.
There’s a picture of her and me dressed
in black. The limo took us to a mound we
stood above as hands lowered the casket of
Ted Hughes into ground far from Fairbanks,
where I am, or rather was. Salmon, trout,
chars I knew all about, and now nothing.
Following Thomas Hardy’s cue, and Sylvia’s
I’m a voice from the grave, silent
since my last gasp of air at the end
of a rope. My girl came home, found not me
but my body hanging from a rafter.
I’m no one, who was Nick the candlestick
in my mother’s poem, and the swelling
in her stomach as she wrote feverishly.
I never got into poetry. Assistant
professor, prominent Alaskan biologist,
I wasn’t writing as if death were a neighbor,
as if death were my father. He and I got on,
I got on with everyone, and am her son.

No Matter How Far I Push You
to the Back of My Mind

At my side a crop of flowers in a glass vase:
pink, lavender, some petals pale, a base
of green, flowers starting to wilt, centered
on a round black table, just to my right,
where you are. Lingering spirits, faces
with names, Michael, Missy, like the flowers’

color-burst, both of you at my side, and, like
hills and clouds, far from the moment we
three sat in a room with a big front window,
around the corner from a bustling street:
a tobacconist, a florist, an array of shops.
‘Michael, this is Missy of the hazel eyes

and black lashes.’ I recall the Saturday
morning I saw you, Michael, a black beard,
at your side a big white dog on trafficked
fifteenth avenue. I didn’t know then how large
you’d loom over me. You sat in a corner
by a lit lamp in the front room of your home.

You lit the evening with the light in your dark
eyes, the sound of your voice, the big dog
curled at your feet. Evening after evening.
‘Come in,’ I hear now as I heard then.
In another home, rooms shared with others
but just we two alone, the front room dark,

except the light from the bath down the hall.
Missy, your hazel eyes, black lashes
say ‘This is beauty, this round, firm flesh
I’m in, not a stitch on. Touch me, my body,
before night ends, before we are no more.’
How I’d love to see one or both of you

walk though my door. Look at this wilted
bouquet’s lavenders, its green base. I recall
green elms, the red of Missy’s mouth,
a white dog that answered to Snow Dog.
The line from Michael’s poem, ‘Women
come up and ask for dog’s phone number.’

Speed Bag

Cutler, Maine’s naval base,
all about radar, was on a coast.
A storekeeper’s apprentice,
no radarman or radioman,
I worked in a warehouse.
I never got to see the bay,
not because of the warehouse.
I was preoccupied in my free time
with going to Machias,
the town nearest the hamlet of Cutler.
I did have it in me, a few times,
to walk uphill
to the club on our base.
‘Strangers in the Night’
played over and over on the juke.
One day I walked up to the gym,
located near the club. It housed,
in back, a heavy bag and close by
the heavy bag, a speed bag.
No boxing ring.
No other sailors or sailors’
dependents back there, no one else,
I hit the speed bag,
suspended from the ceiling,
punched it a few times,
then fell into a rhythm, rapping it,
my fists rolling, the bag
moving away from and back into my fists.
The bay our base sat above,
the Bay of Fundy,
extended to Canada and Nova Scotia.
Bays, like rivers, have high and low tides.
The water comes in at high tide,
goes out at low tide.
Hitting the speed bag,
which I did only that one time,
(my one and only visit
to the base gym),
was like being taken out of myself
and into myself simultaneously.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, House Sitting, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

Image created on Magic Studio