Written March 2013
Salmon nearly kill themselves for it, this thing that drives us – the male of our species – crazy from something we inherit from birth, making us leap up falls we ought to fall down, humping up impossible leaps to get back to that place where everything started. We are consumed with trying it all again, drunk on perfume or the look in her eyes.
Not just me, all of us, as if just a glimpse of her image scends us into a feeding frenzy, so utterly predictable, caught in the net of her gaze.
She doesn’t snare men. We snare ourselves, pained when she casts this one or that one aside because this one or that one just won’t do, the outcasts caught in some dead pool eddy, going round and round, and the most foolish of us, lingering near where the clear water still flows, desperate for a glimpse of her as she carries her net on to someone else, we who might have had, but just weren’t good enough.
For the first time after all these months, I understand the parade of such people, who gasp for air in the still water, grasping at slippery rocks just to keep from being dragged back down falls we are too weak or unworthy to leap up again.
Such men do not understand how she must feel, casting and recasting her net, dragging in bodies she hopes will live up to what she expects when none ever do, tossing them back when they don’t, and always asking as she casts again, “Is this the one?”
For all the fish in the sea, all those who leap with silvery wet skins shimmering for her attention, none prove worthy, none bringing with them that thing she so desperately needs, a thing she can’t describe even in the best of her poems, but will recognize when she sees it, none kind enough or caring enough, some almost, but not quite, while others taken, she casting out again and again dragging it all in, casting aside what won’t do, all these long months, all those sad poems, all those terrible lonely nights clutching her wet net and asking, “Is this the one,” and still never is.
It's no wonder all of her songs sound so sad, because they are.
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