Capone-face, fish,
flabbergasted at being dumped
miles from the #3
can buoy
in half a beer case,
your mouth still chomping
as though on the memory
corona coronas,
you bring back every muddy
high school punt
that squirted through my arms.
When you quit
this apoplectic puffing
it’s going to be one on one
again, me trying to peel
your football hide with pliers
and slash the mastic from
fillets that bake
to a mouthful of petals.
Later, your life played out
into mine, in the dark
if a man comes to slap me up
mid-air, I’ll know why,
my heels doing a dead beat
against this kitchen door
while he threatens
to up the vigorish and improve
my knees with a Louisville Slugger,
or if something hauls you
out of the mulch, a tail
joined to gills
by bones like a drawn-out
musical stave, you will
gloss its coat to a puddle
skimmed by rainy sky.
But no dream of
punishment or beauty
returns you to the stone bottom
and puts a sea clam back
in the pressuring clamp
of your mouth.
In a bucket of week-old rain
I found a grasshopper
clinging to a brown pine needle,
alive, antennae looped around
a water bead or tear,
but thought how senses leave,
bobwhite startling like
a detonated bush, how something
in me always wants to hire out
late and cheap as eulogist, or scrub
the lichen off stone lambs
and set a fallen marker
on its feet, dusting it off,
an arm around the shoulder-
as if it was a kid
thrown by a new two-wheeler,
and it could hear me
tell him, Try again.
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