O fish
we’ve come so far together-
you, so quietly from the start
I never saw, and
only felt you when we rested
after hauling ourselves up a climb,
mowing on a summer day, the primal
surge and flow of coupling.
I could count, then,
our shared rhythm for what it was,
pounding clear and separate from the bathwater,
flicking, flicking, from side to side.
O heart
is it all the times I gave you away,
the shattered you I received back,
that I wasn’t careful enough of you?
Is it how I asked you to be big,
needed you to be strong,
tried to keep you open after all that,
“bleeding,” they like to say, if I chose
not to be -less?
Stay yet a while. I promise not to change.
That, you can trust.
Old couple that we are, I know you, too.
O fish
why this flopping,
the thrashing against ribs
as if truly a cage, when
they only ever sheltered?
Is the great salt beckoning, calling time
at a pitch beyond my hearing,
the long inevitable tsumani rising?
Tell me: is it now we go back,
by quiet undertow back to the wild?
(As published in New Millenium Writings)