FOOD CHAIN (poem)

                         Food Chain

or: The 52^nd Screaming Fish

of Thanksgiving Day, 1971

                              by Dean Metcalf

You, fish

I, fisherman

we are the Cain and Abel of muscle.

Your yellowfin tunabelly

full of lesser fish

that you have murdered,

you take my double hook

your yellow side thunders under water

slapping sunlight up through blue water

all the way back to the sun.

You fight for your life.

I fight for your life.

Braided nylon line

slices my hands with

the electromuscular force

of your fighting, then massages

sea water and diesel fuel and fish slime

into the cuts.

I, sunburned sinew, throw

silver, blue, and yellow

thrashing muscular you

screaming, bleeding

to the heaving bloody oily

     salt steel deck.

Your scream is tiny:

a squeak, like escapes the quick turn

of basketball shoe on maple floor

yet in my ear it makes the whole blue Pacific

resonate with your dying.

I reach into your slime‑slick,

     hard‑rubber jawed,

     finetoothed mouth

for the hook;

you bleeding screaming

staccato tail‑flap

sewing‑machine‑STITCH

the hook across my hand,

leaving perfect dots of blood.

My skipper's voice grapples with the voices of the wind

and the Jimmy 671 diesel engine:

"You got other fish on!

Get that hook

back in the water!"

My hand is trapped inside your mouth,

all wrenching teeth and hook‑points.

I raise the other hand,

shout into the wind,

make a fist,

hammer it down,

crush your skull.

Your eyeball,

the size of a small lemon,

scoots: does it transmit

the sight of triumphant bloody me

     aboard a dizzy deck

back to your squashed fishy synapses?

Your fifteen pounds of perfect muscle

shudders, lets go my hand.

Your blood and mine mix with diesel

and seawater, wash out the scuppers,

returning home.

I will unload your body

at the Star‑Kist Cannery.

I will walk to the hock shop in San Diego,

redeem my guitar, adding the fifty cents

your life means to me

to the dollar amounts of the lives

of your frozen kin

here in the hold of the Dora B.

Or I will fall overboard,

where sharks circle,

waiting.

TO KILL A GOOK

To Kill a Gook

     Four or five of us were in a tent, standing around a map table. A couple more guys came in from the last watch of the night in our machine gun bunker. They checked in with me; I had been Sergeant of the Guard for the night. Someone asked how their watch had gone. 

     One man expressed frustration. He said he was getting short, that he was fed up with all this guard duty where you're always on edge but nothing really cuts loose. Said he'd sure like to kill just one gook before he leaves this fucking place. 

     There it was: the spark of recognition, of vigorous agreement, that arced around the circle of our faces; the darting of eyes as each of us recognized that all the others had been feeling the same thing. I did it too. I felt it; I meant it. 

     "Right," I said. Grunts. Nods. Smiles.