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| Jared Smith |
It was their eyes that always got me,
flat and unblinking as dinner plates
or as the coins we traded in markets,
but come from the deep with something
horrible endless dredged up to the
light,
to be thrown dead naked on dinner
plates.
You eat what you can get, I know, but
the scales themselves catch in your
throat
when everything you eat comes from dark
and is drawn to the light you spread,
and
nothing comes from the land you can
see.
That night the blossoms bloomed at sea
was
like so many nights our lads set the
nets
and lit the diesel driven lights above
them,
and the ever hungry water hissed
beneath,
as the nets played out and the shrimp
rose
drawn to an artificial dawn, and the
great fish,
those that knew the eternal darkness of
life,
rose to the light that filled their
lidless eyes
and thrashed in the final spectacle of
death
drawn to the elusive light that gave
them life,
trapped thrashing into a world of
demons,
The blossoms bloomed at sea distant
while
I watched, first one and then an hour
later another,
so that I held my girl in wonder on the
beach
asking what was that and what was that,
holding
each others hands as we watched the
fairy lights
those trawlers carried on their rigging
burst,
becoming flames that lit those floating
cities
on the beaches back in October of 1941.
The next
day, that fast, the trawlers knew to
dark their lights
but the bodies of some of our Town-folk
came in
smelling of the world of commerce and
of Europe
and their eyes like those of fish
filled with memory.
We read then of the U-Boats off the
coast of Coney Island
at night and the shape of freighters
caught in the light
of amusement parks, and we learned to
eat less
like the Great Depression that blew in
from Arizona
and filled the sky over Washington. We
were afraid,
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