Fish Ladder || Going Home (contrapuntal)

[Read first down each column, then again row by row across columns.]
Fish Ladder		Translated from the English Going Home
Salmon swim upstream.		You can try, but there is no going home.
Bears take their share.		Working hourly consumes a lifetime.
Mountain pond languishes, dammed.		See, there is no going home.
Fish lay eggs, fertilize, spawn.		My baby’s crown smells heavenly, better than coffee, better than gardenias —
Gills struggle, scales tarnish, in wavelet-rippled light.		this is being home.

John K. Kruschke

First published in The Imagist, Issue 6.1, 24 July 2026.

Notes:

Regarding the format: When reading a poetry journal that presented English translations beside originals in languages I don’t know, I realized that the translator could write anything, and I’d have no way of knowing whether it matched the source. I was also piqued by the heading that appeared above them: “Translated from the Chinese” (or whatever the language). So I imagined a genre of poems called “Translated from the English” in which the translation is a free-association based on the original, such that each enriches the other. I added one essential rule: the pieces must be contrapuntal, reading coherently and generating emergent meaning when scanned row by row across columns; otherwise they’d just be two parts of a single poem.

← Previous Poem

Poem List ↑

Next Poem →