Salmon by Mike Dillon

The salmon dying in the woods stopped him. 

And the blackened fruit of it on the mudbank 

beside the stream, the rhythmic forge of its skyward 

gill working the fatal air, held him.

A Chinook. Twenty or so pounds of it

subsiding from verb to noun

while the others thrashed and leaped up-current

toward their inevitable place of cedar shade.

With his walking stick he could gentle it 

back into the struggle except he saw

a darkness had entered the skyward eye.

The salmon rested there in the day’s cupped hands.

A yellow alder leaf drifted past toward the bay. 

The alders moved in a warm breeze 

above the skyward gill working, working.

And he, old now, turned with his stick for home.

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Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent, full-length book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor (Unsolicited Press 2019). Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, The Return, in 2021.