On the drive home, I jump out of Joe’s jeep
and stumble down the embankment.

Joe shouts: “Where the hell
are you going?”

Where I am always going,
back toward the river.

Back to the pool of rising rainbows
where I hook all my regrets, every
last one on seven x and a midge.

It is the same fever a salmon must feel
after spawn, the body failing,
having drawn itself far past

an ability to recover.

Mountain Gazette, May 2009