Kwame Dawes
PROGENY OF AIR
PROGENY OF AIR
The propellers undress the sea;
the pattern of foam like a broken zip
opening where the bow cuts the wave
and closing in its wake. The seals bark.
Gulls call and dive, then soar loaded with catch.
The smell of rotting salmon lingers over the Bay
of Fundy, like a mortuary’s disinfected air;
fish farms litter the coastline;
metal islands cultivating with scientific
precision these grey-black, pink-fleshed fish.
In the old days, salmon would leap up the river to spawn,
journeying against the current. They are
travellers: When tucked too low searching for
undertows to rest upon, they often scrape
their bellies on the sharp adze and bleed.
Now watch them turn and turn
in the cages waiting for the feed of
colourised herring to spit from the silver
computer bins over the islands of sea farms,
and General, the hugest of the salmon,
has a square nose where a seal chewed
on a superfreeze winter night when
her blood panicked and almost froze.
Jean Pierre, the technician and sea-cage guard,
thinks they should roast the General in onions
and fresh sea water. It is hard to read mercy
in his stare and matter-of-factly way.
He wears layers, fisherman’s uniform,
passed from generation to generation:
the plaid shirt, the stained yellow jacket,
the ripped olive-green boots, the black
slack trousers with holes, the whiskers
and eye of sparkle, as if salt-sea has crystallised
on his sharp cornea. He guides the boat in;
spills us out after our visit with a grunt and grin,
willing us to wet our sneakers at the water’s
edge. The sun blazes through the chill.
The motor stutters, the sea parts, and
then zips shut and still.
Stunned by their own intake of poison,
the salmon turn belly up on the surface;
then sucked up by the plastic piscalator,
they plop limp and gasping in the sunlight.
One by one the gloved technicians
press with their thumbs the underside of the fish
spilling the eggs into tiny cups
destined for the hatchery, anaesthetised eyes
glazed shock on the steel deck.
They know the males from the females:
always keep them apart, never let seed touch egg,
never let the wind carry the smell of birthing
through the June air. Unburdened now the fish
are flung back in – they twitch, then tentative
as hungover denizens of nightmares, they swim
the old sisyphean orbit of their tiny cosmos.
The fish try to spawn at night
but only fart bubbles and herring.
On the beach the rank saltiness of murdered salmon
is thick in the air. Brown seaweed sucks up the blood.
The beach is a construction site of huge cement blocks
which moor the sea-cages when tossed eighty feet down.
They sink into the muddy floor of the bay and stick.
There is no way out of this prison for the salmon,
they spin and spin in the algae-green netting,
perpetually caught in limbo, waiting for years before
being drawn up and slaughtered, steaked and stewed.
And in the morning’s silence,
the sun is turning over for a last doze,
and silver startles the placid ocean.
Against the grey green of Deer Island
a salmon leaps in a magical arc,
slaps the metal walkway in a bounce,
and then dives, cutting the chilled water on the other side.
Swimming, swimming is General (this is my fantasy)
with the square nose and skin gone pink with seal bites,
escaping from this wall of nets and weed.
General swims up river alone,
leaping the current with her empty womb,
leaping, still instinct, still travelling
to the edge of Lake Utopia, where
after so many journeyings, after abandoning
this secure world of spawning and living
at the delicate hands of technicians,
after denying herself social security and
the predictability of a steady feeding
and the safety from predator seal and osprey;
after enacting the Sisyphean patterns of all fish,
here, in the shadow of the Connors Sardine Factory
she spawns her progeny of air and dies.