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The Shark's Parlor
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
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All white, like a giant bride's, The only real pages the ones The book opens to; light From the trees is falling squarely On the few large, hand-written words. On a hunting trip I walked through That place, far from all relatives And wars, from bobbins and lilies and trucks. Because ofwhat I had seen, I walked through the evergreen gates Ofthe forest ranger's station, And out to my car, and drove To the county seat, and bought My own secret grave-plot there For thirty-seven dollars and a half. A young deer, a spike buck, stood Among the graves, slowly puzzling out The not-quite-edible words Ofthe book lying under A panel ofthe sun forever Missing from the noonlight ofFairmount. I remember that, and sleep Easier, seeing the animal head Nuzzling the fragment ofScripture, Browsing, before the first blotting rain On the fragile book Ofthe new dead, on words I take care, Even in sleep, not to read, Hoping for Genesis. The Sharlfs Parlor Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed ofthe great fin circling Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer Buckdancer's Choice / 2 I2 And Payton Ford and I came back from the Glynn County slaughterhouse With a bucket ofentrails and blood. We tied one end of a hawser To a spindling porch pillar and rowed straight out ofthe house Three hundred yards into the vast front yard ofwindless blue water The rope outslithering its coil the two-gallon jug stoppered and sealed With wax and a ten-foot chain leader a drop-forged shark hook nestling. We cast our blood on the waters the land blood easily passing For sea blood and we sat in it for a moment with the stain spreading Out from the boat sat in a new radiance in the pond ofblood in the sea Waiting for fins waiting to spill our guts also in the glowing water. We dumped the bucket, and baited the hook with a run-over collie pup. The jug Bobbed, trying to shake offthe sun as a dog would shake offthe sea. We rowed to the house feeling the same water lift the boat a new way, All the time seeing where we lived rise and dip with the oars. We tied up and sat down in rocking chairs, one eye or the other responding To the blue-eye wink ofthe jug. Payton got us a beer and we sat All morning sat there with blood on our minds the red mark out In the harbor slowly failing us then the house groaned the rope Sprang out ofthe water splinters flew we leapt from our chairs And grabbed the rope hauled did nothing the house coming subtly Apart all around us underfoot boards beginning to sparkle like sand With the glinting ofthe bright hidden parts often-year-old nails Pulling out the tarred poles we slept propped-up on leaning to sea As in land wind crabs scuttling from under the floor as we took turns about Two more porch pillars and looked out and saw something, a fish-flash An almighty fin in trouble a moiling ofsecret forces a false start Ofwater a round wave growing: in the whole ofCumberland Sound the one ripple. Payton took offwithout a word I could not hold him either But clung to the rope anyway: it was the whole house bending Its nails that held whatever it was coming in a little and like a fool I took up the slack on my wrist. The rope drew gendy jerked I lifted Clean offthe porch and hit the water the same water it was in I felt in blue blazing terror at the bottom ofthe stairs and scrambled Back up looking desperately into the human house as deeply as I could Stopping my gaze before it went out the wire screen ofthe back door Stopped it on the thistled rattan the rugs I lay on and read On my mother's sewing basket with next winter's socks spilling from it The flimsy vacation furniture a bucktoothed picture ofmyself. The SharkJs Parlor / 2 I3 Payton came back with three men from a filling station and glanced...