In Search of the Salmon of Knowledge

A Poem by Janna Knittel

Photo by Isaac Burke

I grew up eating hazelnuts

but never tasted wisdom.

Still a child, I caught a salmon

out at sea: It fed my family

but knowledge eluded me.

I’ve lived and walked near rivers.

I’ve asked the waters to give up

their secrets. They smile.

If I travel the Erne, if I haunt

my great-great grandfather,

will I drink answers I could not

taste in the Willamette, Avon,

Kaw, or Mississippi?

Somewhere, a new river flows

oceanward. Fish migrate

up and down its highway

carrying myths in their mouths,

stories in their scales.

Janna Knittel is the author of Real Work (Nodin, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line, 2018). Janna has also published poems in Blue Mountain Review, Conduit, Constellations, North Dakota Quarterly, Pleiades, The Trumpeter, and The Wild Word as well as the following anthologies: Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology (Split Rock, 2018); The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition, 2023); and Broad Wings, Long Legs: A Rookery of Heron Poems (North Star, forthcoming 2023). Janna lives in Minnesota but “home” is still the Pacific Northwest.