Why Salmon Jump

I'm sitting on a bench in Alaska

thinking of synonyms for boredom when,

just where I happen to be gazing

a salmon rockets out of the water,

startling as a popped champagne cork.

Flailing its tail-fin at liftoff,

so vertical, so hopeful and so high

I can but laugh for joy.

At its apex a half-gainer

and back in a slurp where it came from.

Hey look! Look look look.

There. There and there. Thousands

across the wide impassive bay

breaching, soaring, raining down

like fizz in a glass of champagne.

* * *

I got to thinking about that Magritte painting

of countless identical men

in black bowler hats floating

down to an empty generic

tidy little town somewhere in Belgium,

doomed until death

to lives of quiet desperation.

* * *

Truth, in its disheartening

nasal voice explains:

Sea-lice, lepeophtheirus salmonis

infest the fish's belly-flesh, producing lesions

and a maddening itch so unbearable

they have to jump,

as if to flee,

in existential despair

as high as eight feet up

with entirely incidental majesty

thereby ridding themselves

of a couple of lice per jump.

* * *

And by the same token

those pendant Belgians could

equally unlikely, neither more nor less surreally be

rising

up from that annihilating town,

its days of mandatory pointlessness

its evenings of blank despair,

bursting from the chains that held them there

and floating into the endless blue sky

headfirst vertically and full of hope

like their cousins the salmon.