By day PETER MUNRO counts fish, conducting research fishing cruises in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. After the field season they chain him to a computer in Seattle, permitting occasional visits to his wife and children between parameter estimations. By night, Munro makes poems, some of which have been published in Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, the Birmingham Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. More poems are forthcoming inPassages North, The Cortland Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. Listen to more poems at www.munropoetry.com, where you will also find an iron-clad guarantee.
Munro also serves as the Poet Laureate, Pro Tem, of Kenmore Lanes. The management of Kenmore Lanes were too busy bowling to notice having awarded him this honor and, to this day, remain unaware. The position has no salary but the expense account is amazing, not to mention the favors, too intimate to describe in detail here, granted by sycophantic followers.
Munro also serves as the Poet Laureate, Pro Tem, of Kenmore Lanes. The management of Kenmore Lanes were too busy bowling to notice having awarded him this honor and, to this day, remain unaware. The position has no salary but the expense account is amazing, not to mention the favors, too intimate to describe in detail here, granted by sycophantic followers.
WRITINGS
Bleeding Cod
F/VAlaska Mist
October 2008, B-Season
58°39.78¢N, 177°02.32¢W
Gills sprung, some pop
when they kiss the crucifier.
Mouths trigger, huge as buckets,
bodies arch sideways all their length,
and every fin flares from pectoral to caudal.
Inboard from gaff and roller, the longline
crackles under strain, steadily threading its machined
narrows. Cod lips hit the slot, hooks rip free, leaving
cantilevers of jaw in ruin, and fish thresh crisply,
skidding the chute to the tank, lashing like little storms.
Ruptured up from depth, each crosses the rail
busted in its guts as gasses expand until the swim-
bladder blows mesentery, living gaskets torn, anal flues
breached, dying even as hydraulics crucify
by kiss. Circle-hook after circle-hook
wrenches from flesh and flesh
sloshes the bleeding trough.
Charles tips his blade into membrane ahead of the collar,
dividing blood from cod.
Miguel touches bright steel through a sluice
of crimson abaft the last gill raker.
Drew lifts an edge honed along fifty-eight degrees north,
slips it perpendicular to the isthmus,
working arc-wise right toward his own grip.
Operculum rifts from pectoral girdle
when Matthew's knife-hand sighs through
as if to release light glyphed in a red spurt.
Shift relieves shift.
The inclined conveyor grinds to starboard.
Mist, frosted adrift of its plate freezer, slews
outboard, swaddles the bleeder, then separates.
Sometimes blood, dead for hours and pooled
in the heart sac, suddenly blackens the trough,
plumed somber as predawn tilted cold
upon metal smelted to sheet and weld.
Sometimes still-living blood pelts
like stormlight loosed from its furnaces
and drawn gusty under nimbus, decrypted, unflumed
from the large-bore artery charged by the gills.
Scarlet curdles to steelwork until the deck hose
peels color away, flushed to the sumps.
At last, a few twitches of muscle,
the cod pumping out as it rides prongs
up the conveyer, final crimson
frayed and hanging in scraps, clotted and swaying
from the grating of the belt, blood-shreds
draped over bolt-heads like some wrecked lace
once knotted from a thread
spindled alive
out of the dark of a world
unseen, the axle of which turns unseen.
At the end of his sixteen hours,
Charles gazes past his left hand,
a claw drawn to.
His left elbow hitches sharply,
recalling every broken jaw, every neck plate
forced and parted. Stiff ligaments
articulate a body of law spoken in salt,
a story of sea chamber and torn aorta
and muscles knotting in his lower back. A legacy
ancient as hunger, no older than fear. Sunrise
blusters ragged at the end of watch.
The day tatters, bleeding out
as if nicked by steel,
the man become mere matter.
First published:
Beloit Poetry Journal
Summer 2009, Vol. 59, No. 4
_______________________
Bering Sea Stare
A deck ape recklessly charges the stack,
head down past the sorting table, building
speed, two steps straight up the side
of the high-racked pots, snagging fingers
to web where steel bleeds ruin
on glove and slickered knee alike.
He hoists himself higher, by round-bar in mild
steel. If he rises through wind, up-right
on the top tier, if he strikes rust
frozen in flakes, he’ll know what ice is.
If he is pierced by glaucous,
if the skreaks of seabirds nail him to the sky
till light breaks upon him
such that the storm’s fire leaks from its farthest edges,
if the wind bites so hard that the bridge of his nose
aches breath by breath, if the stacking crane
dangles the next pot down out of kittiwakes
heeling to gusts raveled in a tangle
as he raises his palm through birds
to meet gear descending,
and if he then freezes for fulmars as they carve
their arcatures complete from salt and squall,
because their sweep pleases his eye,
his arm up-reached
as if to seize God out of the very wind,
he will know bone,
the weakness of bone,
and the degrees separating him
from the terrible flow of things,
(just as, two weeks before,
a glaucous winged gull had suffered
the same lesson under this very same deck ape’s boot,
stomped down in full rage at each fucker
who’d never listened to the voice inside,
the gull’s feet tangled briefly in web near the hand
who was hustling hard to stack gear at dockside,
who’d stomped then angled over, snatched
up the busted bird, and hurled
it straight down the side of the stack to flop
disrupted wings against the black salt-chuck),
(just as, two weeks before,
a glaucous winged gull had suffered
the same lesson under this very same deck ape’s boot,
stomped down in full rage at each fucker
who’d never listened to the voice inside,
the gull’s feet tangled briefly in web near the hand
who was hustling hard to stack gear at dockside,
who’d stomped then angled over, snatched
up the busted bird, and hurled
it straight down the side of the stack to flop
disrupted wings against the black salt-chuck),
when she rolls
and that pot slung over the top tier
swings
and catches him in the ribs,
struck clean,
and he’s gone
and the boat wheels around and slows
and all hands look sharp
but he’s gone
and fulmars bank over grounds
tracked by king crab and cod
and he is
gone.
First published:
Floating Bridge
2014, Number 7
_______________________
Love Poem From The Aleutians
Today I watched two Dall's porpoises
time their blows, bursting
exactly from the face of each wave,
arching together into air for an instant.
Two decks up in the pilot house, I could see
the white patch on their black sides
clearly, and the rapid fanning of flukes.
Such speed.
They live their entire lives in motion.
Such timing,
two breaths taken at once in the flash
into atmosphere.
What do such sleek animals know
of dying? I do not know
how deep their dives into the Bering Sea.
For them the icy blackness
must be a comfort, a known place.
So far away from you, I cannot
time my blows to yours.
I cannot arch my back with yours,
dive beside your sleek side,
touch in the dying time.
We are all dying. I remember it;
I know the icy blackness.
If you come back up for air
I will breathe with you.
First published:
the Seattle Review
Volume XVI, Number 1
Spring / Summer 1993
_______________________
Lullaby In Storm Light
I have heard the slamming of hatches.
I have witnessed the railman’s grunt and heave.
I’ve stood by while my deck boss catches our chief
in his arms, too drunk to leave the Elbow Room on his own.
I’ve staggered under the weight of a young deck ape
who’d mourned his marriage with vodka
then tried to bugger an obese and weathered whore,
her scorn for his failure crowning him like Jesus.
I’ve seen storm light burn black as a Bible,
an illuminating darkness, its locus
the eye of a lone sailor unable to look away.
I’ve listened while screamer captains ream their boys on deck.
I have lifted my eyes to the wheel house high among fulmars
while a skipper on the loud-hailer riffed
hard and long on themes conceived in anger.
Purified by wind, assayed by fatigue,
a fierce language has pierced my ears,
drawn-thin syllables of labor and hurry,
of danger and fear, of rage and despair
in God’s worst place in Creation to be alone,
where sailors groan in their sleep,
piled up like puppies while we steam
down to the next string of pots,
their slickers cinched tight to their chins,
hoods up, rain pants taped snug about their boots,
slumber come quicker than God’s wrath or gales
or a captain’s rant, tossed in exhaustion’s odd dreams.
I have been lulled by the slamming of mild steel.
I have learned fear as the barometer plummets.
Gulls have shat on the hood of my foul weather gear.
The deck boss has poured me my coffee.
The chief has lit a cigarette and leaned back and drawled.
Gruffly, the rail man has offered me a seat in the doghouse.
Green water has broken across deck and we wait. God
hath spoken. The whole ocean shivers. Heaped
in our rain gear until the storm abates,
we sleep while our vessel booms and quivers.
First published:
Beloit Poetry Journal
Summer 2009, Vol. 59, No. 4
F/VAlaska Mist
October 2008, B-Season
58°39.78¢N, 177°02.32¢W
Gills sprung, some pop
when they kiss the crucifier.
Mouths trigger, huge as buckets,
bodies arch sideways all their length,
and every fin flares from pectoral to caudal.
Inboard from gaff and roller, the longline
crackles under strain, steadily threading its machined
narrows. Cod lips hit the slot, hooks rip free, leaving
cantilevers of jaw in ruin, and fish thresh crisply,
skidding the chute to the tank, lashing like little storms.
Ruptured up from depth, each crosses the rail
busted in its guts as gasses expand until the swim-
bladder blows mesentery, living gaskets torn, anal flues
breached, dying even as hydraulics crucify
by kiss. Circle-hook after circle-hook
wrenches from flesh and flesh
sloshes the bleeding trough.
Charles tips his blade into membrane ahead of the collar,
dividing blood from cod.
Miguel touches bright steel through a sluice
of crimson abaft the last gill raker.
Drew lifts an edge honed along fifty-eight degrees north,
slips it perpendicular to the isthmus,
working arc-wise right toward his own grip.
Operculum rifts from pectoral girdle
when Matthew's knife-hand sighs through
as if to release light glyphed in a red spurt.
Shift relieves shift.
The inclined conveyor grinds to starboard.
Mist, frosted adrift of its plate freezer, slews
outboard, swaddles the bleeder, then separates.
Sometimes blood, dead for hours and pooled
in the heart sac, suddenly blackens the trough,
plumed somber as predawn tilted cold
upon metal smelted to sheet and weld.
Sometimes still-living blood pelts
like stormlight loosed from its furnaces
and drawn gusty under nimbus, decrypted, unflumed
from the large-bore artery charged by the gills.
Scarlet curdles to steelwork until the deck hose
peels color away, flushed to the sumps.
At last, a few twitches of muscle,
the cod pumping out as it rides prongs
up the conveyer, final crimson
frayed and hanging in scraps, clotted and swaying
from the grating of the belt, blood-shreds
draped over bolt-heads like some wrecked lace
once knotted from a thread
spindled alive
out of the dark of a world
unseen, the axle of which turns unseen.
At the end of his sixteen hours,
Charles gazes past his left hand,
a claw drawn to.
His left elbow hitches sharply,
recalling every broken jaw, every neck plate
forced and parted. Stiff ligaments
articulate a body of law spoken in salt,
a story of sea chamber and torn aorta
and muscles knotting in his lower back. A legacy
ancient as hunger, no older than fear. Sunrise
blusters ragged at the end of watch.
The day tatters, bleeding out
as if nicked by steel,
the man become mere matter.
First published:
Beloit Poetry Journal
Summer 2009, Vol. 59, No. 4
_______________________
Bering Sea Stare
A deck ape recklessly charges the stack,
head down past the sorting table, building
speed, two steps straight up the side
of the high-racked pots, snagging fingers
to web where steel bleeds ruin
on glove and slickered knee alike.
He hoists himself higher, by round-bar in mild
steel. If he rises through wind, up-right
on the top tier, if he strikes rust
frozen in flakes, he’ll know what ice is.
If he is pierced by glaucous,
if the skreaks of seabirds nail him to the sky
till light breaks upon him
such that the storm’s fire leaks from its farthest edges,
if the wind bites so hard that the bridge of his nose
aches breath by breath, if the stacking crane
dangles the next pot down out of kittiwakes
heeling to gusts raveled in a tangle
as he raises his palm through birds
to meet gear descending,
and if he then freezes for fulmars as they carve
their arcatures complete from salt and squall,
because their sweep pleases his eye,
his arm up-reached
as if to seize God out of the very wind,
he will know bone,
the weakness of bone,
and the degrees separating him
from the terrible flow of things,
(just as, two weeks before,
a glaucous winged gull had suffered
the same lesson under this very same deck ape’s boot,
stomped down in full rage at each fucker
who’d never listened to the voice inside,
the gull’s feet tangled briefly in web near the hand
who was hustling hard to stack gear at dockside,
who’d stomped then angled over, snatched
up the busted bird, and hurled
it straight down the side of the stack to flop
disrupted wings against the black salt-chuck),
(just as, two weeks before,
a glaucous winged gull had suffered
the same lesson under this very same deck ape’s boot,
stomped down in full rage at each fucker
who’d never listened to the voice inside,
the gull’s feet tangled briefly in web near the hand
who was hustling hard to stack gear at dockside,
who’d stomped then angled over, snatched
up the busted bird, and hurled
it straight down the side of the stack to flop
disrupted wings against the black salt-chuck),
when she rolls
and that pot slung over the top tier
swings
and catches him in the ribs,
struck clean,
and he’s gone
and the boat wheels around and slows
and all hands look sharp
but he’s gone
and fulmars bank over grounds
tracked by king crab and cod
and he is
gone.
First published:
Floating Bridge
2014, Number 7
_______________________
Love Poem From The Aleutians
Today I watched two Dall's porpoises
time their blows, bursting
exactly from the face of each wave,
arching together into air for an instant.
Two decks up in the pilot house, I could see
the white patch on their black sides
clearly, and the rapid fanning of flukes.
Such speed.
They live their entire lives in motion.
Such timing,
two breaths taken at once in the flash
into atmosphere.
What do such sleek animals know
of dying? I do not know
how deep their dives into the Bering Sea.
For them the icy blackness
must be a comfort, a known place.
So far away from you, I cannot
time my blows to yours.
I cannot arch my back with yours,
dive beside your sleek side,
touch in the dying time.
We are all dying. I remember it;
I know the icy blackness.
If you come back up for air
I will breathe with you.
First published:
the Seattle Review
Volume XVI, Number 1
Spring / Summer 1993
_______________________
Lullaby In Storm Light
I have heard the slamming of hatches.
I have witnessed the railman’s grunt and heave.
I’ve stood by while my deck boss catches our chief
in his arms, too drunk to leave the Elbow Room on his own.
I’ve staggered under the weight of a young deck ape
who’d mourned his marriage with vodka
then tried to bugger an obese and weathered whore,
her scorn for his failure crowning him like Jesus.
I’ve seen storm light burn black as a Bible,
an illuminating darkness, its locus
the eye of a lone sailor unable to look away.
I’ve listened while screamer captains ream their boys on deck.
I have lifted my eyes to the wheel house high among fulmars
while a skipper on the loud-hailer riffed
hard and long on themes conceived in anger.
Purified by wind, assayed by fatigue,
a fierce language has pierced my ears,
drawn-thin syllables of labor and hurry,
of danger and fear, of rage and despair
in God’s worst place in Creation to be alone,
where sailors groan in their sleep,
piled up like puppies while we steam
down to the next string of pots,
their slickers cinched tight to their chins,
hoods up, rain pants taped snug about their boots,
slumber come quicker than God’s wrath or gales
or a captain’s rant, tossed in exhaustion’s odd dreams.
I have been lulled by the slamming of mild steel.
I have learned fear as the barometer plummets.
Gulls have shat on the hood of my foul weather gear.
The deck boss has poured me my coffee.
The chief has lit a cigarette and leaned back and drawled.
Gruffly, the rail man has offered me a seat in the doghouse.
Green water has broken across deck and we wait. God
hath spoken. The whole ocean shivers. Heaped
in our rain gear until the storm abates,
we sleep while our vessel booms and quivers.
First published:
Beloit Poetry Journal
Summer 2009, Vol. 59, No. 4
