Somewhere inside the tide is a boy in the dark. He has a bucket.

Somewhere inside the tide is a boy in the dark.  He has a bucket. 

He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.

                                       "The Fish"  Elizabeth Bishop                  

She’d said endings but meant

                (because she backed up, you know the way you do when you have to

                parallel park, cut sharp corners you know)

beginnings.  Beginnings, she started

                again, are the mouths of endings I mean, just

look at them or better, think

                the one you most admire the one

                lubricated pair of lips, isn’t your instinct to touch them, with yours, I mean, yes admit it

                to come as close as a moth would

against the porch lamp in the stark cooling of the

                dark.  Maybe it’s an October, middle

                of the month and you’ve come a long way

                in your story and your throat’s cold below the voice box is coal’s ash

and breathing out just lifts it to stick

                like that wet showering snow against the wind-

                shield when you were driving home once  (you know storms like this how at first

the road’s clean clear and ideal and the last of autumn’s wrapping

up carving and laying her one left shoulder down first to the fallow (or

                it will be next spring and summer) alfalfa and that’s an ending

                but it’s beginning

to snow and it’s not even cold and maybe that’s

                why (even though I’m on my way home before dark) I pull over and get out

even though I’m alone I want to taste this:

the first snow, the end of the season’s first beginnings

if that makes any sense at all--

and alone me and my lips we hold close to the right elbow

of the road and we tip back hatless (it’s early for snow

                                                                                I bet it will be seventy tomorrow)

and I love my lips how willing they are

how brave right there on my face they are how

day after day they take it all on:

                the hot coffee (and then the cold)

                the thin line sometimes

                the kinship they have with my jaw

                                almost a conspiracy

                the scouting they do on their own

                                all day and when the time comes they part

                                after leaning, after, listen, this:

                                                                a tip of my tongue

                                                                a tip of your tongue

                                                                                top teeth lip pulled in

                                                                a bit just a drip

                                                                                when we forget we’re human

                                                                                of blood it’s never quite enough, is it?

I have it in my mind to walk out

                when I get home

                at low tide (and it has to be the lowest low tide)

                to touch the lighthouse plunked down

                in the middle of the channel.  This has nothing

                at all to do with my mouth except I’ll take it with me, to draw the salt

                                to lick the gritty mud kicked up by the toe of my boot

                                                except wanting it to suck at my boots

                                to pull them off

                                entirely.  All the brine all the rocks all the soft

                                clam flats and the want to lay it all down

                                under some August or today October morning while this

                                tide goes out goes out goes out

Because mornings are beginnings

and I if can see my feet... if it’s not for the fog... if I can see each pucker in the mud like quicksand

ambushing me to sink in up to the knee--

                the way a boy Kenny did and then couldn’t pull out or through but it was dark it was the end

                of the ebb it was turned back it was his beginning

                                that water at the calf, at the hip, and up and up he’s stuck his like a miner’s headlamp getting dim

                                and furious this cruel fade in the fog...

I want to walk out past all that where he put himself down i want to 

look back at the beach they recovered him on

days and days later.  I want to kiss the spot it hurts--

                but that spot has no start

                                                                or

                                                                stop

it may enter the mouth on stray feathers and then vanish

after that

like bodies buried at sea

how they float, take on water maybe toe first

and go below the undertow as though never
being there at all,

as though all the mouths mumbling murmuring their own shanty prayer

were those loose feathers, as though burying him or anyone wasn’t

                                an ending wasn’t a word on the cliff of my lip

                                I don’t (I can’t you see) let go of but lick with my tongue-tip instead,

                                a kiss

                                a long as long as long   huuuuuuuhhh

                                kiss beginning

right?   she’d said endings but meant something else

entirely

different.