How water moves past rock
is what salmon read to get home.
I consider this as I recall Mike,
a 56-year-old quad in a wheelchair
who could walk if he had been left
until medics arrived,
and Ross, a glass-eyed Korean War vet
who taught me to troll on the Willamette River.
Twenty years passed before I learned
he fought at Porkchop Hill,
and carried a man named Tex twelve miles.
Whitewater says with hard things like these,
find whatever and whoever you must hear,
fight, or dance with
to get where you are going,
to give birth, even if you are male,
to a long ago dream of going from Venice Beach
to Venice, Italy
in your salmon heart.
Once, Shura and I had to leave
the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center early
to make way for a wedding party
and, since five years had passed,
I felt bad my artist lover and I had not yet married,
then, somewhere near Cascade Locks
I knew in ways that mattered most
we already were.
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