absurd hero Alhwaulook

A Poem by pasdepoisson

Tongue-in-cheek Camusian musing

Mid-leap up a
dam's fish ladder

muscular Alhwaulook

(real name conceivable
only as salmon-specific
potpourri of scents)

leap
mid-

in that air-hanging instant
felt his single-sinew-shape

stretch
sensuous

scales flashing million
minute rainbows

wanted to exist
to feel this

in that instant
abandoned anadromous
identity

sensed his superfluity

splashed down
paralyzed with Being
didn..'t swim
was washed
away

back to
the ocean

in the Pacific chill
ancestral unconscious

through eco
echoes

revealed
Piscean purpose

cosmic cogs
of continuity

like all species
oblivious things

causally supporting
conscious
things

purposeless
consciousnesses

only conscious things

die

Alhwaulook the Salmon
was immortal through
many faces

like Brahman

Alhwaulook the Existing
would inevitably
die

I found him
lying still
awash
Puget Sound

oxygen-starved tissue
atrophying flopless

one near-blind eye
drinking the gray gray
overcast sky

I sensed
understood
let him lie

open-mawed

unmolested by
attendant seagulls

Until finally
face-up eye
dulled

died