You’ll dream of this, the finding-your-way by nose, down through a bulwark of salmonberries, outside of time, to the place where the river pulled away and left its travelers in weirs of osiers. Trace the brine of what’s left: the odor of opening, of brackish marinas, of phosphorescence. You’ll dream of them, smell-bodies wavering through willows, tracing the faint current that brings you to where the river stopped rising. Hand to a silver fin– cold, sand-specked– grasp what brought elsewhere into here:
the chapel ceiling stark, without fresco, you hoist the coho down from the dogwood and wick the rainwater away. Gather a bowl of river and mix the crushed charcoal– remnants of a campfire sung over. Plaster, pigment, river: all you need to paint a chapel’s dome, to draw the pilgrim’s eye upward, supplicant, to where this world brushes the next. This salmon is dead. Its body, all muscle, still pushes against your bare hand. Over the gill plate, the ocular cavity, the hook-toothed kipe, you apply the ink till what remains is shadow, rain-heavy cloud. Learn the shape of what goes upriver: hand-first, press your rice paper to the painted fish and watch its twin proof emerge.
For years, you’ll dream of these glyphs: backwards rivers, zinc and rust, intonating fins, all come illogically home to your childhood creek. Point for your mother. Point for your father and brother. They’ll look down from the sword fern bank to the changing water, now deeper, cedar-clear, and see the coho finning, tailing, nosing closer to the natal gravel that never bore them.
The charcoal washes away; plumes of soluble ink lift from the body given back to the river. Hung in osiers, your rice paper prints ripple and dry. No two are alike: the imprints fade through the fibers, the salmon’s shapes, suggestible, as if glimpsed through glacial till. In your dreams, they will swim up your childhood home’s hallways, up the cul-de-sac road. They will flash through the clearest river you never knew was there.
Raised in Portland, Oregon, Sam Olson writes in and about the Pacific Northwest. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Oregon State University, where he teaches writing courses. Find his poems and essays in Portland Review, Bluestem, and Watershed Review, among others.
