Sightings, and: Fixitive, and: Flounder Gigging

Sightings

I see my father
rarely now,
but always
from an odd angle –
in a crowd, say,
disappearing
in a cold rain or,
as today,
in drifting flurries
while I was waiting
to cross Fifth,
and always
for only two
or three seconds,
him going by
in the back seat
of a black car
and breath
comes hard
all over again
after years.

Fixitive

Winter nights, after dinner, I go out
into the dark, hoping for something bright
to hold the day. I take the salt marsh path
that leads to the wide waters of Bogue Sound.

Sometimes I return with a wash of stars
in my head. Or the antiphonal hoots
of barred owls that have built their sound fence
in hi-lo's for maybe a mile. Tonight

there were no stars. A cottony mist hung
over the trees like a tent. Just a soft slapping
of waves at the point. But on the return,
from the road in front of my house, I heard

a panic of squeaks in the pampas grass.
My flashlight lit the cats, Mel and Tootie,
torturing a mouse that they left by turns,
coming to my feet for strokes and scratches

until the mouse escaped – likely to our shed
where the lucid dark of my desklamp
shows him still, entering this room from a hole
in the wall, uncertain at first, sniffing

left then right, as if looking for a switch.
But that's me, not him, looking for a light.
He scurries for birdseed in the torn sack,
then burrows to sleep in my garden glove.

Flounder Gigging

Along the channel edges,
flats and shoals, even
with an underwater light you find
them hard to see.

They must pretend they're sandy bottom
with a concentration so complete
they disappear
into what becomes them.