Food
Chain
or: The
52nd 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment