Salt

Salt: When What Comes Due Comes Through

Maybe that’s where they saw the light

though they won’t admit it’s sacrilegious

and they won’t wash it all off

either, the glow or dried brillo

of it, the all the long day of cutting

the swim cutting the rudder cutting

inside the murmuration  of

the small fish though who among

them have ever seen it maybe one

noticed it in birds, how while it never

took out the sky or took out the sun

completely, the hem of it dropped

and the neatness of it all, the precision,

shifted gears and all at once

the swallows were off east

south east and quick as it could please

a sweep over the low-fog/low water

cove and husband’s boat’s moored

on bottom  though give it six hours

and it’ll float and he’ll slip the slough

of flotsam and move out through.

And too he may not, he’s got other things

on his mind than the greensilver light

right under his bow and his knuckles

while white with salt are a thick fist

full of the awful thought of the unrepaired

net letting finally go, the weir pole

going over, only one, into the bowl

of a decent moon’s catch.  He thinks

about anything but luck.  He watches

the water.  Behind him his woman on shore

at home is in no state of mind

but wait, but go blind looking at coal

and no light but in sound.  But in

the whistle.  But in the flavor of salt

as she bites down on the soft flesh

of her cheek.  Salt, she thinks, in this light,

is wet and oily.  Is on my tongue. 

It is red and pricked with tissue.  Like the boat

deck, the caulked but leaky bow, how crazy

sanity’s the only thing that floats the seiner,

how salt’s the only thing dissolving

as if it were brine like Galilei in the Bible

like what God walks on, back to the shore.