Poetry

Come October I am stowed aboard his boat,
ready to forget soil, the solidity of kerbs,

all the years I haven't known how to swim.
I want to sit quiet in the bowl of the hull,

stitch myself a sequin skin, luminous
as the swell that colours the estuary.

Already my spine is softening,
as if vertebrae might ripple shoulder to hip—

Houdini escaping a straitjacket, elbows merely fins.
I think myself amphibious, turned ocean, like him.

He has trawled the North Sea for species,
drenched along with his catch: flounder and sole,

haddock, mackerel, skate. And cod,
so much you could walk to France on it, he says.

He lives off his wits, doesn't miss fingers
crushed to stumps between stern and winch—

weatherproof as the yellow he wraps himself in.
Barely six miles out, he sets gillnets

upright with floats and weights,
traps herring silver as jewellery.

The tide turns to the ebb-wind, eases off,
and I want to flop deep into water

far beyond the turbulence of propeller and keel-plate
dropping towards silt until sound is echo

in the gill of my ear—juvenile,
small fish-child, squirming as I slip away

zero mouth open to plankton.
Instead, I curl on deck, cradle the weight of the debris

I carry like spawn in the rucksack of my belly:
frayed twine, green glass, driftwood.

Things that, later, will wash up on the shore
like me, my one fish eye open to the sky

aghast at all the possible blue.