To The Dead Of Winter Poem by John Beaton

To The Dead Of Winter



(Little Qualicum River, after the fall salmon run)

Now is the time of the moss
and it blankets the alders en masse
as they stand in the mists of the bottomland;
though witch's hair drapes from their frames
they're but haggard old widows in weeds
who abide by the graves of your race,
for these trees seem so sere that their sap will not rise,
that their laceworks of leaves will not lattice the skies
though their grayness and gauntness have donned the disguise
of these snow-sprinkled greensleeves of fleece.

Now is the time of the snow
though at noon there's a moment of thaw
when the river runs clear by the skulls
and the gill plates at rest in the shallows
or enveloped in white on the gravel
like masks. And your head has a jaw
that grew hooked as you ran with your instincts aflame
and your scales turning scarlet; the maples became
inflamed with your fire which the winter would tame
as it laid down your dead like the law.

Now is the time of the dead
between fall, when the fleshpots were red,
and the frenzy of feeding that spring
will bring with the fingerling fry—
they will die in the dance of the riffle
or flee to the redds in the bed
from mergansers, and herons, and gulls to endure
as their myriads falter to fewer and fewer
till they run for the sea and return when mature
to this bone-yard, from which they were bred.

Now is the time of the bones,
of your petrified gape. It bemoans
how the beaks picked your skeleton clean
as they pecked out your stomach and heart
through a grille-work of ventricle racks
on a spine that is chevroned with spines,
leaving teeth that ripped herring-balls—blood, scale, and skin,
leaving orbits your eyeballs were gimbaled within
and an arrowhead neb that was driven by fin
to be bonded by ice to these stones.

Now is the time of the bonds,
of the destinies twined like the fronds
in the lichen. Your whole generation,
who hailed from this valley, returned
and in thousands engaged in an orgy,
its climax a Slough of Despond's
sh-sh-shudder as victims were swallowed—the strife
as the spawning stress killed with its gralloching knife
and you wallowed in currents that vied for your life,
with which Time, the great river, absconds.

Monday, December 16, 2019
Topic(s) of this poem: river,winter,bones,fish,journey,life and death
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
The fall salmon runs on Vancouver Island rivers are spectacular. But in the winter afterward there is a strangeness. The salmon have all died and their eggs are alive under the gravel. The deciduous trees have lost their leaves and many are covered in thick moss and lichens called "witch's hair". I wrote this poem one day when there was snow and there had been no floods to wash away the wall-to-wall skeletons of the dead salmon, now picked clean of all flesh by bears and birds. This poem has been previously published in "Able Muse".
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