Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Father

• 7 Father I am like you, Mama always said. Often we went fishing. It takes patience and silence to be a fisherman. Most fail, you always said. I am like you, Mama always said, and if I reach back far enough we are fishing again from the narrow rock ledge that jettied the ocean at Seal Beach. We crawled out to where crabs and unnameables crawled out of dark seaweedy crevices, the dark holes the ocean kept screaming up from. We sat there, always on the dark side, for hours. days. It takes patience and silence to be a fisherman. We sat in the cold, cruel spray of wave after wave churning to shore, and with the contorted fishy bodies of fishermen, old, toothless, bearded, their awful cries above the cries of gulls after deserted mussel. bait. I am like you, Daddy, Mama always said. Your body a great melancholy night in which I sat beneath your heart in terrible silence and fished. The old men danced as the day moved on, those fishers, those broken bearded kings, those • 8 Ahabs. As the flaming ball fell to the water line between my thighs I was a drowned creature drifting hundreds of years in the unspeakable foundations. Unwarped, unarguable shapes glided to and fro before my passive eyes. Did I ever catch a fish? Did I ever want to? I wanted only to sit there longer on the dry landside of my father knowing the shadow of my father is my father. Daddy, still I wake on that broken throne of gnarled torsos. Daddy, the dark power you cast I took. Though sometimes still the girl curls into your humped darkness contorts her fishy body into the great heartsea beneath your ribs and in silence works her way all the way back to an old woman coming from Asia and further than that to an old white whale cruising the pelvis of the world until our story (You, the ruthless boy so young even still I see you outlive me • 9 is turning into foam and the great birth from your severed and flung genital. ...