Hunting Creek
We missed the eagle’s plunge and grab, not the fish he grasped as he flapped up
the creek.
Making a feast with our friends surrounded us with errands, the errands with
engines. Tides pulled, then pushed, satisfaction flowing everywhere, crab pots,
duck blinds. We talk and think in versional swoops, like parallax, like old
automatic transmissions called Synchromesh. After dinner, the elegance of
degrees of retiring after dinner. Light on the dock, on the post. Water ruddered
by moonlight.
It’s not all about love, not all about desire, it’s all about desire and love.
We missed the turn, coming to a highway sloping into a valley, the Irish Sea
down below, the Mystery of Being in Wales. The spanking-new you greets the
spanking-new me, twins again, we tremble since we are so simple. Is it soulful
to say I am simple and sorrowful? The jokes I tell toll with a tell-tale throb.
A light lump of lather fell off my face and lodged on my chest hairs, a
perfectly O’Keeffian cloud. Body art, body weather. It slid off easily onto my
finger. The worm hooked on my hook fed the fishes. My life in the wide world.
Your tides in my life. Flying upstream.
David McAleavey
Copyright © 2011
David McAleavey teaches literature and creative writing at George
Washington University. HUGE HAIKU (Chax Press, Tucson, 2005) is his fifth
and most recent book of poems. His poems have appeared in many journals,
including Poetry, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, and are
forthcoming in Magma Poetry (U.K.), Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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