—for Josh, Zach, Noah, and Daniel
I watch them try and try for nothing
but tiny bluegill, sunfish, crawdads even,
anything to feel a tug, though they’d call it
necessity, as if they had to feed a dozen mouths.
They bend over the night-crawlers
with a whopping knife, too jagged, in love
with tools, machines, reels.
They’re serious, removed, all of them,
threading half-worms as bravely as they can,
leaving me out of it, trying to act as if
the oozing is normal, required, after all
they’ve been taught about kindness.
It’s excitement and mystery under here,
a boat churning through, echoing against
the bridge, and Zach, pulling up his bluegill
at last, shining and flapping.
He stops its fins down with his fist.
The fish looks at him, one eye at a time,
from its other world. From this one, the meaning
seems clear: the yanked hook, the yellow
plastic live-well barely wide enough for a fish.
But there’s the human to figure in,
the complications of its mind, as it crouches
beside in splashed and sticky shorts.
After the hammer-blow, it’s not so hard
to saw off the head, to scrape scales
into a universe of stars, fish-quivers
giving way to plain flesh.
What lesson can be learned by this?
It seems like no lesson
on the blue-willow plate—only eating
or being eaten, which turns out at last to be
a quiet exchange, nothing that could have been
helped, desire being what it is,
and fish like little knives,
pointed toward it all the time.