Fishing Winter

 

Fishing Winter

 

Maybe in winter promises are

auraed with warnings: a promise

 

of snow, a promise of sun

but the temps well below zero.

 

The folks who take on such a,

well, I don’t know what to call it,

 

gift-giver, bluff-caller, that this

weather is, have been made

 

to earn these cautions.  Their downs

& various animals of wool. 

 

Their fists in their mittens.  Like this

sea in front of her

 

house, all steeped in vapor.  &

the boats, they all seem to be

 

cloaked in smoke, the ice is palling

the chain-made scallop drag.  In it all

 

a lost scallop shell, its meat

long hauled off by a gull or some other

 

wintering-over shore bird

that gropes & toes the rockweed &

 

tideline, this shell, nearly invisible, is

half now of itself.  Valveless.  What was just

 

being said about promises? or  are they

warnings?  The boats are going

 

out today.  The sternman breaks the ice

with his hammer.  The captain smokes

 

& blows his coffee cold.  Somewhere,

though not here, not yet, a sun.

 

The sun.  What else will burn enough

to burn off the sea’s smoke,

 

the slabs of frozen water falling

back with a splash?  And who hears it,

 

soft and swallowed in the seemingly

invisible ocean yet making the boat

 

rock and rub up its mooring like that

half-feral cat in the kitchen at her leg? 

 

That merganser, maybe.  Lone and poking

below the water, drowning some

 

and rising some, in the sea made thick.

thick with smoke of dare.

 

Dare to come out.

Dare.