As much as I recall the moon above
Lake Erie, our three lawn chairs centered toward it,
the shared blue bottle, cold vodka
that was becoming a struggle to drink,
I remember most remnants of fish
constantly finding themselves to shore,
the eyes eaten away.
Heaving winds grappled against our words,
making them impossible to hear on the beach,
but audible to anyone sleeping above us
in the classy retreats lined along the hillside.
Only a few lights still burned in the hours
that smoldered past midnight.
Leaving our chairs, we stumbled
over the sand.
Offbeat steps to avoid those fish,
and greasy rags of seaweed, green shadows
that almost furnished their own dim light. We stopped
to talk to a couple, both in high school:
she from Toronto, he from Boston.
They found each other on this beach.
Their story seemed too familiar-having dismissed
their love, and my own the winter before,
I left the group to drink, I set out further
down the sand over unburied skeletons.
A fence forced me into the lake,
I felt awkward in the water that
burned against the blisters on my feet.
That cold and clear tide, slowly
drawing into itself reminded me
of when I walked along the creek banks
and leapt willingly into streams,
minnows scattered at splashed steps as I searched
for bait with my grandfather, lifting stones
for crawfish-then one overturn brought fangs,
a grinning, scaled head flung me back.
The rock dropped.
For comfort I learned revenge.
Together we pelted rock with rock till it broke
and we were sure everything beneath it broke too.
Years past; I no longer knew how
to fish,
find bait. But there, on the shore that spun in unclear air,
I searched again: Beauty, light, even something
mundane as the shooting stars that kindled
across yesterday when I wasn't concerned.
But nothing redeemed.
I tried to step out of the water-instead a jump
back-a look down. Another fish, its skin corroded,
waves licking the body in rhythm.
An almost lustrous tail,
reflecting what light there was back
to my eyes. And its own empty eyes:
vacant like a roman sculptor's
god staring past me to the sky.