Salmon poem

Nora Dauenhauer, the Tlingit poet and scholar, has a poem "How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River" on the Poetics and Politics website. It's dedicated to Simon Ortiz, and it reminds me a lot of his poem on how to make chili. She begins:

It's best made in dry-fish camp on a beach by a fish stream on sticks over an open fire, or during fishing or during cannery season.

In this case, we'll make it in the city, baked in an electric oven on a black fry pan.

INGREDIENTS Bar-b-q sticks of alder wood. In this case the oven will do. Salmon: River salmon, current super market cost $4.99 a pound. In this case, salmon poached from river. Seal oil or hooligan oil. In this case, butter or Wesson oil, if available.

And so on in that vein. But it's a recipe and a cosmology lesson in a recipe. Her serving instructions:

After smelling smoke and fish and watching the cooking, smelling the skunk cabbage and the berries mixed with seal oil, when the salmon is done, put salmon on stakes on the skunk cabbage and pour some seal oil over it and watch the oil run into the nice cooked flakey flesh which has now turned pink.

Shoo mosquitoes off the salmon, and shoo the ravens away, but don't insult them, because mosquitoes
are known to be the ashes of the cannibal giant, and Raven is known to take off with just about anything.

In this case, dish out on paper plates from fry pan. Serve to all relatives and friends you have invited to the bar-b-q and those who love it.

And think how good it is that we have good spirits that still bring salmon and oil.