The Fishmonger

The Fishmonger

Last night the witchlight went out.

All that was left was a drugstore flashlight

running on green ginger tea, shining a fisheye bulb

of irrational hope netted and dragged

from behind the moon’s peridot dustsheet

over a skinwalker's wrinkled  
tillage of shadowseed fields, where

silence and sleep grow beside

dismembered acorns, and nothing

can keep out the cold.

And so, while Jupiter and Mars

two pissholes in a celestial snowdrift
laser stared from a black sky,

eight times I called out my wares

from the roof of my fogbank hood,
hair wintered strings of snowmelt dripping

while I scraped my heart’s hollow clean

with a broken pen, wound the spell

with a cropped limb’s tingle and

threw a fish upon the fire.

It may be that it will never burn, 

that silver son of ocean,

but something within it seemed

to ask to swim the flames

to show me winking from the coals

the nature of

water and heat

and dinner, and at last

the bright chaotic kindling

of a spark.

February-March 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

In the final edit for this poem, I made lavish use of Shawna's Monday Melting word list at  rosemary mint. Thanks, Shawna.

Image: Poissonnerie, by Petteri Sulonen on flick'r

Thanks, Petteri, for the pic and the title,

both of which had proved extremely elusive to land.

Petteri's photostream

Petteri  blogs with exceptional verve 
about all kinds of things at Come to Think of It