I am the animal who woke in the dark,
who broke racks, slamming pans
of frozen salmon onto the belt.
Angry heads glared in piles by the guillotines,
hearts and guts paved the floor,
slid down drains to the sea.
I envied the guy who stood in the stainless steel hopper
his silver eternity, shoveling shiny corpses
toward the lines. Zen Pete said
“If they’re stiff, they still know they’re dead.”
The weight of the kings in my arms felt the same
as hoisting a sleepy toddler off to bed.
I was a slow and lazy worker.
I liked to look at the rainbow scales.
I always pretended I was the greatest
factory technician who ever lived,
scraping out the bloodlines with my thumb,
popping out the hearts through the holes
where their faces used to be,
letting them pile up, beautiful as roses.
I slept with Carver’s Ultramarine
and a wind-up alarm clock
behind a curtain made of a flannel sheet
with scallops cut along the bottom,
with a wooden crate nailed to the wall
above my bunk for storage,
and my boots at the bottom of the ladder
ready for my descent
when the boss walked the line of bunkhouses
hollering for the start of the next shift.
I rubbed the burning pain from my feet
with aching hands, read a few consoling lines, slept
to the drone of the generator,
the factory hydraulics thumping through camp,
with the smell of socks drying on the stove,
and the door propped open a bit
so I could hear birds,
fill my lungs with fresh wind
and look out through the narrow gap
at green humps of grass and distant marshes.
I knew their names and nicknames; chum, sockeye, king.
I loved their sweet, clean smell
and admired the pretty colors they turned
as they started their terrible journey.
Later their haggard looks ruined them,
their dissolving flesh was no good to us.
People laughed like the fish would hear
and feel ashamed to be such fools for love.
They laughed like they knew better,
like it would never happen to them.
While waiting for the reds to run
a few of the old hands built a smoke shack on the beach.
During the season the smell wafted through camp.
It was the best smoked fish I ever put in my mouth,
sweet, salty and alive, with contraband whisky
to sip between bites
that came for Robbo and Louise in a box marked
“Danger! A.I.D.S. Test Results.”
I was tired and in pain. I laughed and laughed
at every joke.
The tundra was her own large beast
with green fur,
I could feel her love
that would just as soon feed me to the bears
across the banks of Big Creek
where it fanned out into the
as cushion my long steps with grass and moss.
The tundra was an animal lying down and hiding
under ribbons of bright water
and herds of caribou.
Seen from the sky, the estuaries
were extravagently curved and shining,
the world below looked as if it didn’t need
and wouldn’t welcome us, it was so green
and so un-useful, containing no fast food
or loud machines, and permitting our passage
with tough turbulence, which made me feel
like a cowboy. I cried for all my relations
who had never seen the tundra from a bucking plane
that was like an old Chevy Nova with wings.
Sixteen on, eight off.
found the sun low on the horizon
bronzing the waving grasses.
We scrubbed our gear with bleach,
washed our hands and faces of smells and scales
at the long outdoor sink, crossed board paths
over mud to the cookhouse
to piss, rest, and smoke.
I was lonely
in spite of friends and mournful guitars.
Quite often the fisherfolk
came to our cookhouse for a meal.
We got four squares a day,
plenty of meat and cake.
It was hog heaven.
When the fish were running,
those who caught them
might work 36 hours straight,
yet they didn’t look that bad,
nothing like the gaunt fish spawning.
There’s a name for someone
who swims home to spawn and die,
but I don’t know what it is.
I should know.
I should hold on to these things.
Yesterday I went looking
for “that thing that you wear at night
to keep you warm.” I couldn’t
quite picture it but I knew my hand
would reach for it while I followed behind.
Words are a bother and a cluttered house
they climb over each other in piles
sweet white fly babies newly hatched
looking everywhere for suck-love
the I want of all existence.
My words are pining away, dying for attention
but nothing is getting through.
I’m too tired to care for them properly
and they nag at me from occasions long gone
pressing me to tell the stories.
Not for any good reason, but just because
everything deserves to exist in its fullest expression.
Stories have life, they evolve, they want to live
but first they have to be born.
Someone has to tell them so other people
can see them, so they become as alive in them
as they sometimes are in their own experiences.
All of a sudden I feel like every story I tell is fine
and the words in them are children
who think my faults and failures are fringes
who wish they could wear glasses like me,
“I want a peg leg and an eye patch,” says one
“and a parrot on my shoulder who flies away and comes back.”
They think I can do anything
because I allowed my sink to peacefully transform,
a student of evolution, observing
organic matter on a matrix of dishes,
a sublime, pungent world that I liked best
when the fruitflies came to stay. With each generation
they became more and more
“the kind of fruitflies who live in Donna’s sink,”
very tiny and polite. Because I let them live
I learned to love them. Did they grow to love me?
I’m a superstitious person, a scholar of “what if…?”
On a factory trawler I looked in the eyes
of yellow fin sole who wiggled
in my gloved hands, flopped
in the pans, disturbing the careful pattern
they were obliged to be frozen in.
I felt I should say, at least, “hello.”
Maybe the fish, being seen
would hate me, at least they’d have
someone to blame, it would be a comfort
if with their last breath they could curse me
instead of crying “Momma! Where am I?
What’s happening to me?” like the pollock, who
crushed in the nets self by self with
puzzled, stupid faces seemed
to deserve their fate by being helpless
and mystified instead of cynical and appalled.
The yellow fin with their sideways faces
and golden eyes made a nice pattern
shingled in the heavy pans. It was easy
to daydream and eavesdrop, to care deeply
about snagging more pans when El Gordo
sent them back with a shout. Cardboard
from the end of a large spool made his cap
a sombrero and his pencil thin moustache
and carnival voice were an art form
to make the time pass, to remind us to laugh.
I tend to think of myself as strong and lazy
but the truth is, I tire quickly, and my best
is nothing to brag on. I would like to believe
that if I tried I could really kick ass
because it feels better to have a choice
but the fact is my mind is adrift and my rhythm
rocks with the ocean. I compensate by understanding.
Anyway, there’s a difference between endurance
and energy, between managing to remain alive
and really living.
What’s more I can’t even endure the everyday
without taking time to talk to myself. Otherwise
I forget who I am.
I could have passed happy hours watching birds
wheel over water, the trawler suspended in sky,
but I made do with small sips of wind
hauling trash from the factory to the deck, looking out
for a few seconds, into black space and lit up birds.
No one knows my effort of desire and will
when I decide each day to continue living.
I don’t appreciate it myself, most of the time.
It irks me to be so slow, aimless, and heavy.
Being slow is okay from inside of it,
if it’s allowed, but generally the world
is impatient, and requires purpose. I prefer to do things
for no good reason, especially climbing
and dangerously leaning out, almost ready to fly.
It makes me feel like I’m realer than real
superimposed, doubled,
in a comic book, being and seen.
It’s as close as I can reasonably get
to freedom from the sadness of not being enough
because daring and foolishness are so exciting
almost like tipping over into a new dream,
a new life, a different kind of animal.
Being at the edge of sense is when
everything has a good enough reason to exist.
Useful is a junkie’s word, it means
what can you do for me? What guarantee?
It’s the trickery of being able to think.
A fat man laughs a big, broad, ho ho,
because animals like us have to make our mark
on the air, on the moment as it passes.
One of the deckhands paused to chat
where I sat on deck on a crate
about how his wife was going to be mad
because he wouldn’t be back in time
for their anniversary. He had a large pot of coffee
he was taking up to the other deckhands, who were examining
porno mags and tying knots. Even Captain Tim
in his thick loud voice bawled out he’d miss
his little daughter’s birthday for the sake
of these fat fish our radar found
so we could fill up the freezer hold
and increase the amount of our checks.
You’ve got to take it as it comes,
like the guy who got home a day early
to find his girl in bed with his best friend.
She hid naked in the cupboard under the sink for hours
afraid to come out. He wondered where she went.
One man lost a hand to the header.
He stood on a saltwater hose as he worked,
lost his balance when someone jerked it.
There’s a plastic guard for the blade, but it has to be big enough
for a pollock the size of an arm to slide under.
Amador had the crappy job of cleaning the sumps,
came up covered from head to foot in shit.
I was lucky, every time
we entered or left
it was during my shift, I’d work on deck
watching the islands, hauling lines,
thinking of my father’s mother’s father
who worked on a car ferry in the
He’d just gotten his captain’s papers when polio put him ashore.
Two years later the ship sank in a storm, all hands lost, so in the end
polio got him an extra thirty years.
When the weakness returned in his 70’s
he had a trapeze hung over his bed, to get
his strength back in his arms, but it didn’t work.
That time he finally went down.
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