they leap again

poem?

The river is falling water, a waterfall too sideways to be a waterfall.

At one place in the river, the river curves down, dropping over a three-foot drop, a waterfall too short to be a waterfall.

Against gravity, against the sideways push of the river, salmon leap in dozens up a stout cliff. They leap like heavy arrows shot from a limp bow, shot again and again.

They leap again. They leap into the not-waterfall’s curve, smashing their ugly fish faces into the rocks, ricocheting back into the river’s flow.

They leap again, too short this time, falling back into the river’s flow.

They leap again. Do they learn to navigate by what pushes against them, addicted to the struggle?

They leap again, this time stupidly straight up into the air, falling back again into the river’s flow.

They leap again. Do they feel the futility of their struggle?

They leap again. Is each next leap like the first — just what has to happen next?

They leap again.

Then, finally, at long last, they leap again. One of them clears the rocky cliff, short and impossibly tall, into the upper-level river’s flow. The river up here, as below, is a sideways waterfall pushing against them, but now they’re up here.

Now, at least and at last, they have overcome the most difficult part, and are up here.

They are immediately welcomed by two bears poised at the cliff’s edge.

The long-clawed bears crush the salmon skulls in their mouths, with vacant eyes.

Mid-crush, the salmon caught try still to struggle upstream. But now, the stream is a bear. The salmon struggle into a bear.

This is all recorded and broadcast by the National Park Service.

A bar in Portland that calls itself a “taproom” plays the broadcast on a TV, without sound, against a soundtrack of some gentle music.

Two small girls smoosh their noses against the bar window, like cartoons against a cartoon window, to watch the broadcast. They laugh once in a while.

The girls’ mother sits at a wooden table nearby, outside the bar. Hunched in exhaustion over a pint, or maybe in relief over a pint, but over a pint, and exhausted, the mother stares ahead, like a bear vacantly destroying a fish, or, destroying a fish, vacantly.

The mother vapes. The vapey plume moves over the girls’ coloring books.

What is there to want?