Two Poems for Pleasant River Community Forest and Downeast Salmon Federation
by Rodger Martin
Oct, 2021
Three Rivers
Capped in white, an eagle pair soar
with a juvenile over the tidal kirk
that is the East Machias River.
Their constant Kyries a supplication
to a dream, a belief, that what has
been done, can be undone
were we as constant as the eagle.
Along the Pleasant, a beaver sculpts
the trunk of an oak to a spindle
leaving the tree upright, balanced,
like a ball on the nose of a seal
who awaits the perfect moment
to bring it down.
A rowboat is beached nearby
along the quiet flats of the Otter,
even were it Michaelangelo sitting with his oars,
he would know we exceeded our limits
and his Pietà now would be
upstream, at the falls of the Otter,
where salmon once leapt with the eels.
Columbia Falls
Like an ancient castle lost on a loch
where The Pleasant meets the tide
a defunct fish ladder, and a great dump
of granite blocks thwarts waves beside
an eroding, degenerative power station.
And for boys, now men, balance among
the remnants remains a dangerous ration.
From the bridge above, a safer watch for smelt
beckons as waters gush on tidal flats increasingly hidden
beneath the cold rush of Greenland melt.
Will tomorrows render yesterdays ever again?
Better to push upstream to a quiet tributary
like the grilse, even if they’ll not return,
find a rise and cast about like an angel
stripped of wings, grounded to the autumn floor.
How does one stand vested to experience
where the flitting of an eyelash is an epoch?
Where the micron of a micron measures the present?
Faced with such lineage, an albatross
chained around the neck, how can one not cave
into himself like a slow collapse of folding chair
back down to a barely remembered dawn
and the even more unknowable black hole
that is the future. Does it hold a heartbeat?
The scourge of our species is, despite self-laceration,
we cannot help but rise again into the shuttered sunshine,
lean heavy on our walking sticks, and trudge
through the yellow staghorn, the upright forest,
between the glistening Caesar’s Amanita until
we reach the bank of that tributary, look down
where clean, yellow-filtered clovings along the bottom
of this silently moving brook give solace to the grieving.
Rodger Martin’s new book, For All The Tea in Zhōngguó, 2019, follows The Battlefield Guide, (Hobblebush Books: 2010, 2013) and the selection of The Blue Moon Series, (Hobblebush Books: 2007) by Small Press Review which was one of its bi-monthly picks of the year. He is a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts (NHSCA) roster artist and a touring artist for the New England States Touring Foundation administered by NEFA. He has received an Appalachia award for poetry, a NHSCAs award for fiction, fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities to study T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy at Oxford University and John Milton at Duquesne University. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout the United States and China where he also wrote a series of essays on American poetry for The Yangtze River Journal. Visit Rodger here: rodgerwriter.com
Downeast Salmon Federation’s (downeastsalmonfederation.com) mission is to conserve wild Atlantic salmon, other sea-run fish and their habitats, restore a viable recreational salmon fishery, and protect other important river, scenic, recreational, and ecological resources in eastern Maine.