Cleaning a Fish
By Dave Smith
In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw,
shaves the flesh. It grazes the white
belly just over the heart.
Underneath, the coiled fingers
are cradling a soft flesh
as if it were the jowls of the aged
man propped for a while on the bench in the park.
The head is not severed, the eyes not out.
Blue, they appear to flash odd ways
where a tree makes a live shadow.
Mostly the eyes are dead.
Nothing is in them
except the intense blue of sky the tree allows.
There is no conspiring of nerves,
no least event recalled
by a limb’s high arching,
or even a girl’s ascension
from a forgotten distance of water.
But there is something as she lifts the meat.
It is enough to draw down her gaze.
Now her arm rises against
yellow hair fallen
white in a childish face.
She is still as a leaf barely clinging.
I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass
and touch her to see the startled,
upthrusted gleam of her face.
At brow and each cheek
like gathered beads of mist
scales leap with the sun, and are dead.
No word passes between us, but something electric
as a flash of steel makes her
cry out just once. Squatting
at the yard’s edge, she
sings beyond any thought.
Her knife flies as lethal as love
and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.
Copyright Credit: Dave Smith, “Cleaning a Fish,” from The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Copyright © 1985 by Dave Smith. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Source: The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (1985)