Ghosts
The older ones wouldn’t tell us what for but,
still trusting, we followed instructions:
we gobbed peanut butter on our big toes
and from the sunbaked dock dangled our feet
into the darkness of the lake.
Just wait, they said, and we did—high noon:
our arm hair sparkling, one-pieces gleaming—
watching splashes on the planks disappear like ghosts.
Just wait. And then, a single shriek, a scuffle,
and then more, as we each felt our toes
enclosed by soft and gumless mouths, a strange,
insistent suckle, rubbered whiskers grazing
our soles. The older ones howling as we kicked
and then froze, spellbound by these fathomless visitors.
The catfishes’ gray, expressionless faces
staring up at us, mouths agape like a church choir’s,
struck by an unfamiliar sun.
Crabbing
With a hatchet from the garden store, my father hacks
through the bonepale armor of a dozen crabs.
He extracts each one from the yellow holding bucket, places
it bellyside sunward on a piece of found plywood
where the waves break. (The many legs argue and argue.)
He steadies each body before digging in the blade.
The work is not clean; each whack is effortful. Even cleaved
the crab’s jointed appendages move articulately,
more memory in them than life. It thrills him, I think—
salt crusting his fingers, seaweed circling
his ankles—this intimacy with each crustacean’s specific
and cracking architecture.
The sea sucking at the beach removes the innards,
rinses the shell, leaves only
the sweet white meat. A system ineluctable and thus,
for him, ideal. Returned to their bucket,
each half-crab no longer scrabbles for home. My father
shoos off the bothering gulls. His catch
his own. His shaven face is flecked with flung mustard,
fine knuckles sliced by split carapace
and claw. The blood on his khakis blue-black
and miraculous. Smeared
and enlivened, my father—both boy scout and ancient god—