She thinks the caught trout’s eye must see
a monstrous face, for after all
its slick belly boils in her acid hand
and the hook’s fluke knits the delicate jaw
half-closed. But I am not so sure.
Could you, so landed, understand
the majesty of God might live
among ten thousand types of fire?
Such beautiful meats we also might have been,
happily bereft of love and the black pearl
of emptiness our solitude protects.
Except she puts the hook and line aside
and enters the river and kneels there,
asking the current to kiss the flesh her now
flameless hands would caress again to life.
Narrow and cold the fish’s world, and sleepless too,
they say. But think of the long night winter must be,
how, nuzzling the dark silt depths,
even a trout might dream of her—that hand,
the bottomless sky, the same terrible blue of her eye.