Sunfish

2. Sunfish

The eye:
she curls encased
in sticky gel, piercing
membranes, breathing fluid,
twisting stretching coldness free,
to wherever she can go from where
she can no longer stay. Like this
her accidental home, crawling
past trees which squat to dip
their sagging branches in the murky flow.
From sandy swamp to floodplain marsh
it carried away the blood of its namers
till that was lost in all the other blood
and everything that grows from blood.
These waters remain bereft of grayling,
muskie, toothed and sleek
northern pike; what swims
here are rock bass, bullhead,
red suckermouth in a cloud of mud,
and delicate iridescent bluegill hiding
among the cattails. This place is no less home
to creatures of that other world above.
They come as before, as before their bodies remember:
the bones of the hand compressed,
grinding; the ear twisted;
the jovial grandfather’s tobacco stained beard;
caged cruel eyes smirking. Read here his
scrawled signature lost in mud – his net cut,
discarded, lapping in foam;
a few bits of crudely hooked wire
scattered to cleave themselves to the frigid bulk, their rust
a permanent poison part
of the tree roots and blank cracked limestone.
Here his true and vital offspring spitting,
mutating malicious boy, leads without looking back
a younger companion. Their bare feet flatten sharp
sticky grass on the way into the shade. Each boy
is clad in raw cotton and rough denim, carrying
a cane pole, the older has in one pocket a long
fillet knife wrapped in leather, from
another sticks slender curved glass. Late
that morning they reach the cold dirt dark
above the bank surrounded by thick
bark and droning insects. Baited fat and
squirming lines in the boys stand smoking. The older shows
indifference to the younger’s feeble jokes. He laughs
still, trying to laugh louder, he winces at
the taste of the cigar and the sour dry
stinging smoke burning his soft lip. He watches, makes his eyes
squint like his friend’s, spits to the side like him and pours
down some whiskey which weighs
in his gut like lead but numbs his mouth
to a dull throb under his gums.
Tall and feeling it speaks
deliberately, twisting his skein of
pieces unfinished he says: a honest man is only
one who ain’t been caught yet. He sits
and is mimicked legs bent out in front of him
leaning, he describes: and the bastard told him he could
come and take it back and he’d a done it if he hadn’t
gone and got himself beat like the devil’s mule.
Eyes drawn narrower he yawns and he reaches
up to pull the grayed shirt off his dark
back sunburned stretching the thin
pink lines over his shoulders. He brings his
hard hand onto his knee, the bruised
fingertip nailless touching the fabric not far
from the other wanting to feel that
bony grip like ice seizing the base of his spine
reaching all the way up to meet the fire
from his head in the chest. Moving over the
rough cherry spots over black hairs scattered, aware
of his own face smooth cheeks flushed can’t
look up at the one he wants to please him, breathing
more slowly than he needs to find the place where it
releases. Try not to shake too much. Pushing the teeth
into his lip he bites his own tearing skin.
At once they see the cork quiver and dive, the younger
boy slips getting to his heels, squatting he
pulls the line taut which jerks the fish by the lip and
brings the hook through the palette to poke out through
her eye. Mouth open in triumph reaches
behind him for balance, the other arm stretched
to hold the sunfish lifted from the water, her color
fading, skin cold and changing in the air, swallowing
vengance despaired while the boy fingers and
twists the barbed metal. Asking for and receiving the
knife he drives it through her belly to the spine,
holds her up on it before the other’s
face for judgement: let it alone dummy,
is all he says and he turns away to spit and walks
off to be alone.