Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt

Generation, generations at the mouth

Generation, generations at the mouth clans of salmon,Chinook,coho gathering just off shore,backbones no longer intact, steam-pressured in millions of cans, picked clean barbecue leavings in a thousand garbage bags ripped open by cats,rats, they can’t find their way back what is the body’s blueprint? return what is solid to water, the first people said returned, every bone intact generates the giving back of race, kind, kin choked in urban outfalls, fished as they aim for rivers sediment-thick with runoff, tamahnous of the wild they hover, sonar streaks, impossible vision-glitches, outside pens where farmed look-alikes grow pale & drugged kin, wild skin, wild & electric at the mouth where rivers disappear in the that that is not that, the chinook can’t find their way back come out of the blue: this flow, these energy rivers & wheels, radiant giving unlocked. & not this frozen, this canned product eagles once stripped, eagles, bears, going, gone, hungry & wild outside shut doors where light pools & we pore over stock market news, refuse, refuse our interrelation, refuse to pour back what is the body’s blueprint? impermanent, shifting energy blocks in its own becoming, a stream & streaming out to the void where rivers lose themselves 40 / Rivering in the bardo as many beings as waves gather at any opening, those inbetween and not-yet ones that race a river of sperm to be here now, light pour, each cell in its dying turn returns what is the mouth of the river now? a toxic 0 of emptiness? teeming hole of ever-becoming we create? re-entry. re-turn. verbing the noun out of its stuck edges and into occurrence, currents, curre- . . . we’ve lost the verb in our currency a frozen exchange streaming emptiness (they’re fishing in London now) at the mouth of the river, clans of the possible are gathering, the chinook, the coho rivering just offshore are us. The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt / 41 ...