Saumon Fumée by John Barton

Saumon Fumée

by John Barton

Whoever translated the menu
at Angeline in Les Galleries Lafayette

did so badly, there’s no escaping
the aftertaste of his words in my mouth

as if they were in the mouth of another
my heart giddy and dissociate—

‘smocked salmon’ à la carte…
—an epiphany perhaps, but not

the food of love, instead a net full
of this year’s declining catch

stood atwirl on their tail-fins
the best of their generation lined up

and looking quite fetching in frilled
aprons with bibs smocked

like those my mother would hand
stitch for my sisters and no doubt

for me, costumed in drag before
I had any taste, foretelling

in habit what I—like these mincing
fish—am proficient at: kicking

up my heels in some nicotine-rank
torch-song bistro in the Marais

assuming the fishy body
language of this sleek chorus line

their flesh not yet terminally infused
with smoke before they doff

aprons into the ravenous arms
of the audience to swim upstream

in the buff into the highlands
virile bodies tattered by rocks

skin hanging away in strips
the teeming whitewater rouged

up as sunset or sunburn—
more like sharks in a bathhouse

these frowsy crepuscular doyennes
than the pretty-headed torpedos

of svelte with quick-fire payloads
they once were—prematurely

aged by the journey backwards
to the source, which is not

the destiny of anything kissable
and where they elect not to

spawn, but spill their DNA
unregenerate onto the stream’s

bed of gravel, together or alone
for the hell of it, kamikaze

and correct in whatever language
however battered by love—