memory sleeps
beneath time’s blanket,
closes its eyes,
and disappears in dream.

life is leveled, edges beveled
smooth and regular.
days pass.

thirty-seven years later
a helicopter is shot down
in Afghanistan.

men are lost

and fear chokes me
again, high above hills and jungle,
taking fire from below,
a Chinook just like theirs,
frantic to fly
away.

What I Mean When I Say Chinook Salmon

By Geffrey Davis

My father held the unspoken version of this story
along the bridge of his shoulders: This is how
we face and cast to the river — at angles.
This is how we court uncertainty. Here, he taught
patience before violence — to hold, and then
to strike. My fingers carry the stiff

memory of knots we tied to keep a 40-lb. King
from panicking into the deep current
of the stream. Back home, kneeling
at the edge of the tub with our kills, he showed
the way to fillet a King: slice into the soft
alabaster of the pectoral, study the pink-rose notes

from the Pacific, parse waste and bone from flesh. Then,
half asleep, he’d put us to bed, sometimes with kisses.

Redds shine like new nickels on the dark river bottom,
salmon have returned to spawn the Deschutes,
navigating by primal memories written in DNA,
an internal Tom-Tom GPS wired in their brains.

Watching them struggle up the ladder,
consumed with a drive to leave offspring,
they are herculean athletes battling
the current and the inexorable pull of gravity.

Were these the fry I helped to seed four years ago?
A Squaxin woman told me once,
ghosts of her Coastal Salish ancestors
ride the salmon out to sea and home again.

Roe in these redds dream also of the sea,
their salty eyes and nostrils perceiving
spirits in secret claret-red kelp beds.
The waters ask only to be haunted again.

it's not the first time that a Bristol Belvedere
(type 192) helicopter flew over my
house...
              am i right in thinking
i'm somehow associated
with the army?
ah ****, for amusement's sake,
have a funny thought
(cognitively speaking
funny via mere thought
you're into sit-down comedy,
appropriately suggestive
as a delusion - but funny as **** -
pardon my french -
on a rocker with dell boy over 'ere,
mm mange tout, mange tout -
mon rz too, mon ż too -
honestly, check my search engine
IP address statistics,
most of them begin with:
polish diacritical z / s / c / e / a / n / o / l);
actually the Bristol Belvedere
is debatable... it might as well have
been a ‎Boeing CH-47 Chinook.

cobalt rain
rides the foothills
mountains conspire
in malevolent
cloud lairs

beneath gray waters
she treads
the warming sea
in constant current
scaled desire

burnished crimson
silver sleek
with ripened need
she lives to die
upstream

Dual rotors spinning
Sitting ducks fly in mid-air
God, please speed this up

Marinate me in sterling serendipity;
a lace handkerchief blowing in electric blue
Chinook.
Howl and twist your obsidian spit down
her leather throat until she reproduces
glass golem.
Clang & the brass of the thunder,
muffled underneath a Reith that was last
lathered
in hathgraven gatherings.

**** him with your sour tongue
&
rag water whistle .
Cut him down from that arugula suspension
&
let gravity fold into him,
like an aluminum foil gargoyle,
crush to the core.

I walk down the pier,
All sea-salt dreams and hand-spun darkness
The buildings are bent from the wind
As are the people inside them
But it is voluntary,
So they still appear strong.
A man sits on a corner
Wearing only his clothes and half-moon smile
I think he must have been born
Before the flood took Kwakwaka’s voice
And thunderbirds were more than midnight cries
Of feathered laughter on the Chinook
I think he must know that for which I search
He calls me over to his barnacle throne
And says in a black-bear voice
“If its fish you want,
Be here before the rain
That comes on the heels of daybreak
And buy from the man with the golden tooth,
His fish are good
And his hands honest.”
That night I dream of lighthouses
And the way the stairs wind like a promise
Out of the toss and turn of the night
And the way they hold boats and the men inside them
All those tangled strings
In a fist of yellow light
And the way that light becomes a phoenix
To those who choose to give the land a second chance
Or a third, when the sea proves more fickle a friend
Than the women who have given up hope
Of being more a lover and less a lion
Than the blue-dress lady with a red-dress song.
At daybreak there is a black bear at a fish stand
His arms are laden with bodies like silver coins
I know he does not fish for wealth
Besides that of the wisdom brought
By knowing your home and purpose.
I think he must know that for which I search
He calls me over
And says in an old-man voice,
“If its love you want,
Be here before the sun
That comes on the heels of the breaking tide
And watch the one true glory of the earth
Give birth once again to forgiveness.”
I believed what he said because I could still see
The sunrise reflected in his eyes
Like a prayer.
At dawn there are two figures on the horizon,
Hand in hand,
Brothers maybe,
They jump into the breathing chaos
Of the still-dark waves
And become the fish that beat in their mother’s chest
Become her heart and her blood,
Her veins and
Her children

In my mind, as infinite as the heavens,
I am but a starry eyed stranger

Wandering through her shimmering realms
Beneath an ebony sky, laced with crimson,
Beclouded with spiraling sprays of stardust

A child, a warrior, a saint full of sin,
I pass through the vapour of my shadowselves

Layers falling away like rotten tree bark
Exposing the rings within, like fingerprints,
Looping coils of time, bending but unbroken

Somewhere in the distance a dragonfly dances on the surface of the water,
Unknowingly admired by a sharp toothed Chinook

As another lost soul pulls back on a well worn syringe,
Seated on a broken toilet, slowly leaking across the scarred, yellow linoleum.

While a mother in Africa nurses a starving baby from her malnourished breast,
A stomach ravaged by dysentery,
Lips cracked and bleeding beneath the relentless heat of the sun,

And a pimple faced pop star sips champagne from a crystal goblet,
Wearing eight hundred dollar sunglasses and basking on a beach in Barbados,

Where they will spend more on hotels and liquor for a week than most families will earn in wages all year.

I close my eyes to imagine a world where only dragonflies sip champagne,

and people ACTUALLY care about one another.

But the former seems more likely than the latter...
So I return to my inner sanctuary of dreams...
And once again, I am infinite.

Flood every grocery sack with opened up noodle boxes.
Ask the butcher for fresh chinook salmon.
Bother the pharmasists for a secret remedy until he sighs and gives in.
Give the lady yourcalifornia sunshine drivers license when she yawns and
Has to make sure you can buy a bottle.  ( I imangined what happened after we danced.)
She moved my pulse like safeways selectice bold brazillian roast.
I believe her secret recipies for pickled seduction.
Every first isle Leaves  me happily underneath the celings act three popcorn
Until I beg her to hold like fresh melting george forman grilled cheese (what I was looking for a long time from now)
The iron clad grill Whisperes"you have found her missing grocery list".  Why has her bias condemmed possibilies canned tuna fish in oil.  Theres nothing to see insider her locks of eggplant stems.   i can find a alternative way to cash my sacronized invisible receit stamped with red words raincbeck.  I couldnt afford you impulse items.