Shrimping, and: St. Francis, Hiding

SHRIMPING / Jack Stephens After great winds have spun seaward and the sands are wet-new, electric and pale blue, let's walk out past the jellyfishes, flying fishes, walking catfishes and the fishes drying in racks with their flies and their smell of the saline breaking waters. Walking, I might show how the pounding of peninsular surf and the pounding of bare feet on the pier's wormy planking, is the pounding of blood in our heads. If we thought like the ancients we'd think of a red tide fanning into capillaries with a throb. But we see barnacles— volcanic through our wider eyes— plumed antennae combing the remittent tide. What I might conjure out of fading light is a new or unknown moon pushing beyond itself in molten orange cocktails, horsetails of porphyry and magma spume. Beneath us, a starfish parodies this gesture, pushing its stomach into an oyster, melting it detestably past itself, pulling back to consider its meal. You who sometimes stumble on these dark-warped planks, sometimes fall, as I do. Horizon skewing, and still we carry our buckets of ignorance farther—mine, awkward as an unformed idea of you; your face, a secret just out of reach in the opaque water below nadir. 60 · The Missouri Review Poles jut here or there, extrude their glistening filaments into the chambered sun. Here, a father's calloused hand, gripping its own soft-shelled and smaller likeness—a fresh star-shaped scar where a hook was pushed through and removed from the thumb. There, a boy sloshing bait bucket in time to his new cracking whistle. His plaid shirt, too large, spinnakers and luffs in the breeze. This is how we arrive at land's end, at the beginning of our test of faith. Sitting, we will dangle our legs into our slice of night. For you, I will sculpt in shadow and consider the even smaller things, crustaceous and unsuspecting, that rise to this makeshift light. Consider the way that light chases itself into nacreous scales, dabs or flat stones across the water, into selves unwilling to lift and rejoin— or unable— until that moment we have just turned away. Jack Stephens The Missouri Review · 62 ST. FRANCIS, HIDING / Jack Stephens over there, behind that fern's fiddleheads and the encroachment of the lesser and more prolific greens, peering with the one good eye, in his moss and slime mold robes; like the savage, almost unseen, that stares curiously from the Rousseau with its already fading pigments of twilight. We are laughing monumentally when we intrude. Why, we ask ourselves, are we come to this, who love and misunderstand enough to hate, too. We say locus amoenus. We mean selva oscura. For we are crossed, doubly, and star-crossed, having moved to this mutable shore in waves. Water, and no proof of passage save we are here. All trails having been made by others, we find traces, broken artifacts. What was once granite is now concrete and somehow less tangible for this the further we go. Gardens like this, it seems, grow best on rotting and self-digested grounds. And, like new plaster covering the flaws on a statue's face, or where a wrist has been poorly rejoined; so, this seed-gone lawn covers rust, broken bottles, corner stones, crumbles and sighs, latches and hasps that will not swing, speak, or suffer us to imagine what now extinct creatures' eyes burned in the dark of 62 · The Missouri Review the barn, whose doors long ago lined the insides of termites and worms. Through these trees we do not doubt other buildings tilt, halfdismantled and scrapped by hard-hatted worker ants, microscoped, civilized. Footward, vicious black waves clear-cut the grounds, having crossed two continents and an isthmus to get here. Thousands of small indecipherable fallings—heliotropes, hollyhocks, stocks, stalks like telephone poles, decomissioned, adust. So much for the syntax and grammar of apocalypse. We sift. We are sifting. We have forgotten that the barn, once maybe a slaughterhouse, is reduced as well. A portal rent in the foliage mends itself in the breeze. Fingers interlock, and unlock, and lock ... as indecisively as an enferned and...