What’s in White Salmon? she asks from the dream.

I thought she meant a fish, not slivered in pink

but an albino aborigine, blank eyes communal

and naked. The dreamfish camouflaged, moored

in the stream’s float and swaddle. Water carves

boulders into that color. I see the salmon staking fame.
But faith in landscape is meant to deceive.

What you meant when you asked was about place.

There and here is where land meets the rain,

the super-hero swims slow in veins tied to mornings

and the birthing of crane-fly hatches ever so soft.

You might be remembering Rocky Lake when you dreamt.

All that rising, popcorn in the water bursting.

The fish we couldn’t kill, larger than our solitude.
Rain and land make somber peace under an arrested sky,

eventually casting light toward river’s untouchable shadows.

The salmon then gives back the boulders’ graves,

the decomposing house of leaves, upstream darting

among twisted leader and hooks, pulling, in water’s current

the pulse that wakes and rocks us.

We must awaken from the dream, I tell you,

because we must keep getting wet, our scales as skin,

having forgotten how to rise in the fogginess of white.