A Fisherman Observes
Should we go to Mars? What happens to the people on Earth? My grandfather loves to fish. I do too, but I’ve always felt guilty eating them afterwards.
Look to the ships: they trace the sky
In metal musk and bottled white
In tails of smoke like fishing lines
Against the current, and the light.
Beneath the glitter of their skins
Something ferments, and though the rays
Are bright, the sunshine cannot warm
What lies within. Before my gaze
The pixels flash; the screen goes black
Such is the fate of shiny things —
A death a lifetime overdue —
I leave the house. The sunlight stings.
Beyond the edges of the town
The roads fade into mud and murk.
Buildings, torn and twisted, spear
From swollen waters. Here I lurk
Below the giants, concrete, steel,
Titanic bones whose shadows throng
Above the sea — the fishes here
Will not be here for long.
I cast my line and look upon
A window in a mossy coat.
Inside the glass, framed in green,
There sits an old man in a boat.
He looks as if he soon will starve:
Sustenance is not enough.
Above the tremble of his hand
Bloodstains blossom on his cuff.
With every cough, his body shakes
As lung by lung, each breath is cast
Into the gray. His tendons strain
To pull the next — to push the last.
So the sun in summer falls
To blot the sky in copper hue;
Above the clouds, there should be stars
And in their glow, the chosen few
Will toss and turn in beds of ice,
In cryogenic fugue, in dream.
In baiting death, they will emerge —
Eyes open, and gleam.
We cannot help but hunger for
The riches of a fresher fin —
The ripples of a solar tide —
And so by dusk, the bites begin.
And so in dawn, we cast again
To bait the stars and multiply:
To smoke a world in salt and flame
And bleed another ocean dry.
Alas—the line twitches.
I ease the fellow in.
A wriggling little fish
With scales of burnished tin.
