Ducks grow fat on water
like unmoored hyacinths.
I’ll sit along the pier and let the brine

expand in my lungs:
headstrong and luckless.
Love set you off like perennial blooms

in dwindling sea. The sun has turned the wooden
cats febrile and rearing, wet hands tendering
the Bastet-furred shorelines.

Memories of Lent anchor the flaunted symmetry
of nymphet legs, revolving numbly
in fanfares of cold drench.

I can hear the piper call of victory
over wan medusa eyes, one flat legless fish
the Ozymandias of them all.

Extinction hums between shaman knuckles,
the valuable clutch of gazing flounder.
Living and rotting, its mouth gaps in wordless ovals.

The water is treeless.
Impatient,
I prick myself on purpose.

I do it with hooks. There is an exceptional
magnetism between fishhooks and fingertips
when time evolves into shuddering gills and

chimneys punch through the roof of a fish’s
mouth house. Grapeleaves blacken and levee
delicatessen flesh for us old dogs.

Nimbus clouds shade over my sister’s
disappointment. Vermilion bait rings free
on our empty hook. Their fish juts,

scales kissing the panicked dock, evergreen
howl vanishing beneath chill surface, a miniature truss.
Our fishhook arches curiously. She touches it also.