Rainbow Trout
In the background, a stand of wooden derricks pump crude, while in the foreground, among pits of pitch-black ooze belching methane, diggers for fossils toil. These labors will lift your tiny bones from lower strata also holding mammoth tusks.
When sheets of ice ruled the north, where some of your far kin found refuge in a still-running river, some of your near kin swam in the canyon stream flowing amidst boulders and scrub, high-circling condors surveying the water’s meander to the ocean.
A swimming trout implies its habitat, that habitat’s biosphere, that biosphere’s configuration of the Earth system, and their relations and feedbacks at scales of time short and long and of space large and small. Observe the finny creature with care.
A camera peeks into the water to capture the pinkish-red band along the side, the blackish spots numerous above the band, less numerous below, the splotch of dirty yellow abutting the upper tail fin, the almost white belly and, overall, the silvery-gray.
Above the well-known waterfall, past which the streambed continues up the snaking gorge, a deep pool in those isolate upper reaches has become for rainbow trout a refugium guarded by steep canyon walls. A mayfly lands on the placid surface. Splish.
Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024
