Salmanoid
Trout have tender scales: a fleshy, unctuous parcel with bones buried so deep it is a fatal squeeze that feels them. But gutted and grilled, each rib pops up delicately, curved like an eyelash. Hook the right one, and it is a fight from bank to bank: running line, bending rod, spooling the reel. Catch many, but keep only the one who gives himself up, who does not thrash from your grip as he faces the stream’s current.
Gasp your soft belly
shine that slick prism for me
surrender, this once.
Thin Skinned
All of us softer than beetles: No shell, sharp claw, beak bramble or bark. Just this flushed flesh (easily sunburned, too). A painless, pea-sized lump, like a pearl, the chart reads. Not the melon a Kumamoto suggests or the Blue Point’s mineral finish (raw boys, we called them). Rocky Mountain oyster, pearl-less and then black-pearled. Like the pearl, Houseman wrote, poetry is a morbid secretion. There is no other sanctuary: the ovary, too, hangs like the moon, turgid and pale, against a malignancy of night.
What hull of what ship
What membrane, what casing could
ever shelter us?
