How the little bills of blood
squiggle on his thumb! Little red roses
prowling around the fisher’s wrists.
The mackerel thwacks his back
at the back of the boat,
lustrous and thirsty and stunned
wide-eyed as Eurydice’s gaze
on Orpheus’ back as he begins
to turn round
and the sun stalks the water
like a yellow moth as Dave takes a blade
and cuts another fish open vertically.
The sunset liver swollen, attached
to what must be the stomach oozy
and a weed-pebbled spleen.
Where is the heart? here it is, under
the piano strings of the gills,
amethyst and unbreathing, here,
heart-small fish (his eye is much bigger
than his heart), how still and quiet now
like water all undone without ships.
Dave throws the guts like a glassblower
blowing on-fire air ballooning out
and the guts go up and up and up
and the gulls form a fog over
the fisher and chatter like teeth
jarring open hard fruit, swooning
on top of the fish fire, throwing
themselves like foolish lovers in heaps
of wings and beatings and beaks.
When he is done gutting, the man holds
the mackerel in his hands, drops their bodies
in barrels that rattle clear and loud as oboes.
His eyes are green, the same green
as the sea (eyes do that—take on the color
of what’s around them, just like the sea).
But the bodies of the mackerel—
they don’t reflect anything, too
opaque to see through or into.
their mouths gaping like monks
in quietus, and the skin so intimate
soft and romantic as a Neruda poem,
glazed over by the cool rub of cloud.
The unblinking gawk of black eyes,
sun hiding its face, hunched-backed man…
A half shell glides along the bottom of the boat
in the blood-tinged water. It is broken,
but there is still some pearly tint in it.
Dave stoops low, picks it up
and puts it in his pocket, then goes
to start his engine. It drones
in his heart with echoed squawks,
oil-grinding-machine hammering
and sand-chewing sound of waves
against the hull already scaling
with sea-tongue spit and the storm-
petrel’s flit, shadow, mired in the frame.
The fisher steers his brow towards
the steel pink shore, thinking
to himself. It may rain.
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