WHY I FISH
Something elemental’s caught in the net—nothing I thought
before I was alone and faithful to blood mire and tide pull—:
Fish don’t fear in the last breath the grandeur of death:
In their silence deeps of waves where they belong:
no land or skies:: so I no longer feel the sky
watching me: The atmosphere fumed while the fish rose
in splashes: evening I looked at myself in blood and mire
and grasped myself—gilled, marked with
gold scales: righted and wronged.
AS STURGEON
Pigs, kings, and paupers have eaten the caviars, when on the end of a line
tied to a strong tree you jostled, were hauled, cut head to anus,
membranes and sac parted, length of your beauty spilling mineral beige.
By banks of red-bay, palmetto, black tupelo
where colossals—full-plated and creased—once
thunder-drummed, down to tannic currents, you still swim night
threshing, days gold moiling,
time husbanding you and gravid you rise
by tail stroke and tail stroke on your belly
expelling the salt liquors and little, little eggs,
pearl-strung on wet cob hair,
cumbered water wake creaming
first slime reeling round and round once and ever
sundered from shark lochnessed:
body formed in wild water wondered dark
beauty-
in-body body dogged.