Fishing
By Heidi Seaborn
~with a line from Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense”
With fingertips, I peel off the skin, then debone soft salmon flesh
the hue of autumn leaves, the late afternoon sky.
I recently read a poem about fishing, but it was really about desire,
failure and ultimately forgiveness, and it ended with praise.
A friend tattoos seek joy on her wrist.
Challenges me to write joy in this season of venison and bitter greens.
So, I imagine myself in the blue of Greece,
drinking Assyrtiko and picking Xiphias off the bone.
And then I become the fish, swimming down the gullet. If you desire
something for a long time when it arrives you feel relief,
and then grief. There have been five mass extinctions
in the life of planet Earth, the shark has survived four.
I keep thinking of the Bob Dylan line he not busy being born
is busy dying and wonder if busy is the issue here.
I’ve spent my life on the pages of a planner.
But now in the uncluttered space between days, I hear the faint sound of oars.
Then imagine Jonah in a fishing trawler wrestling Hokusai-size waves,
the kind that minnow a mountain, and God sends him into the belly of a whale.
I have drowned once and will again. Perhaps I’ve angered God.
Perhaps God is the shark in this story.
And survival is a dhow, is a mistral.
Yet—ah that quick tsk of hope—yet
the act of a tree shedding leaves is one of conservation. A gasp of exuberance,
before letting go like a salmon dying after spawning.
About the Author
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Rattle, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. Find her online at: heidiseabornpoet.com
