The Night Fisherman

from Star Sequence

I go out on the shoals as the sun
blindly crawls into the hills and stars peer
into deceptively reflective waters murmuring
over the bars. Heaven must love a mirror–
blazing stars tossed across black sky
shimmering through mists then back
up again from haunted waters below.

Then there are the fish, endless
schools of them, browsing
the white sand, making their living
flickering amid refracted starlight
and glittering sand. I strain my eyes
to find the luminescent stripes
of bonefish darting colorless
as death in the moonlight.
On these shallows it’s hard
to tell up from down.

The ocean calls to us all,
the stars, the fish, and me, but we remain
plying the brackish tidewater, resisting
the undertow of tides and days
passing under the sun. And when angels
look down on me with their gold eyes
through the ragged edge of the coastal gales,
with riptides threatening to drag
the lot of us out to sea, I strike
the oar’s shaft savagely into the sand
leaning with all my might
against the weight of the storm
and whisper to the bonefish,

No one was ever saved by despair.