The last of the light
fades from the western sky
until the mountains melt into the dark.
We are rafted to six other fishing boats
adrift on a gentle swell,
stopped on a school of salmon.
The scattered vessels of the fleet
are dark shadows in the distance –
white lights glimmer above them
as they drift south with the ebbing tide.
It’s hard to tell where they stop
and the stars begin.
I sit on deck,
lean against the stack,
still warm from the run south
out of the river to beat the tide.
A seat cushion beneath me,
flashlight balanced on my shoulder
reading, trying to wind down
the wire of nerves I always feel
before a big day.
Caught up in the story
I batten out the night noises:
the soft clinking of rigging
moving with the swell;
the gurgles, sloshes of the hulls,
the sigh of the sea so close.
A sound comes behind me –
faint at first, then again, and there, again,
a whoosh of an exhale – a breath – a gasp for air.
I put the book down and stand
to see first one arcing shape break
the surface, then another:
a sliver of light gray
rising from black water.
Belugas! I whisper into the cabin
of my boat and another. Word spreads.
We gather in deep twilight on a dark sea,
stand silent as they rise for air around us,
hunting the salmon we are stopped upon.
No one speaks.
The night swells
a void above and below,
dark upon dark, each sprinkled
with specks of distant suns –
and a meeting in between,
where we float, and they swim.
This poem has appeared in Mr. Dixon’s Waiting to Deliver: an Alaskan commercial fishing memoir (2022, FisherPoets Press) as well as in his poetry collection, Mending Holes (2025, MoonPath Press).
—
Patrick Dixon is a past poetry editor of National Fisherman magazine’s quarterly, North Pacific Focus. A member of the FisherPoets Gathering organizing committee, he received an Artist Trust Grant to edit Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology (2014). His chapbook Arc of Visibility won the 2015 Alabama State Poetry Morris Memorial Award. Mr. Dixon resides in Olympia, Washington. Mending Holes is his first full-length collection of poetry.
