Watching the Old Man Clean the Pike

His knife slits the fish like a tough loaf.

Silver teeth slipping to the divots of knuckles,

scales catching in the creased brown skin.

Blood trails the altar of the cutting board,

sluiced to the squealing planks of the deck,

the tufts of moss, the rusting canoe on the rocks.

Its stomach rolls out like a slick satin bag.

Inside, a second fish,

swallowed whole, salt-white, color boiled away

 

in the deep black of the belly. With the knife’s tip

he slides it aside, its eye gazing up

like a small, stunned soul.                                                                        printable

Heiligeberge

    “Holy Mountain,” Heidelberg, Germany

At the top of the berg we come upon it.

Between the flat husks of two monasteries

racing to settle their skulls in the grass

a navel caves the green hilltop

where the Nazi arena stands

bare of any distinguishing symbols,

any sharp mark from Goebbel’s heel.

The low stone steps sloped from the stage

are gently blurring their hard bevels.

Grass juts from the joint of stairs,

clings in the mortar, sprouts from the gaps,

its green furls insistent as birth.

It has pushed the dust from its roots,

claimed the empty troughs of torches.

The only recent traces here

are scattered glinting bottle caps,

the dead pit of a small bonfire,

a few corks pulled and dropped on the rock.

These are the things they will unearth

an era or two removed from ours.

Moss relics of the Celts’ ringwall,

the lumpish nubs of Roman pillars,

rock roots of a nave, the grass-buried stairs,

these bottle caps thrown like wasted coins.                                                printable