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I saw another ladybug Chicago could win if  I eat the leftover fish & chips in every line so I don’t forget We went to the river called fish & chips We stayed at the fish & chips tower They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation so we could go to school for free It’s called fish & chips college for women

Holiday Inn kitchen, the day I am born: My father is frying fish for a party of seventeen when the call comes from the hospital. He stays until the batter is crispy, cold salads scooped on platters, rye bread buttered. Dad never told me this story. He told my boyfriend, one short order cook to another. Mom doesn’t know why Dad was late for her screams and sweat on the hospital bed. Once, when she was angry with him, she told me: When your father finally got there, the nurse had to tell him to get upstairs, “Your wife is having that baby now.” I hope that when Dad first held me, it was with haddock-scented hands, apron over his black pants still sprinkled with flour, forehead oily from standing over the deep fryer, telling the fish to hurry hurry.

Fish of the flood, on the bankèd billow Thou layest thy head in dreams; Sliding as slides thy shifting pillow, One with the streams Of the sea is thy spirit. Gean-tree, thou spreadest thy foaming flourish Abroad in the sky so grey; It not heeding if it thee nourish, Thou dost obey, Happy, its moving. So, God, thy love it not needeth me, Only thy life, that I blessèd be.

He startled to see a statue of blind justice really did loom over the courtroom. But remained determined to scorn symbolism. She needed a quarter to call her lover— the docket was full, she’d be late for lunch— and he gave her one. It was not a taunt, acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was a quarter. The fact that they had done this— even this!—together and cordially, late nights at the dining room table with a bottle of cabernet, sharp pencils, A Love Supreme , and an “E-Z Workbook” from the well-reviewed—the fact that they’d read reviews!— Don’t Pay an Attorney! series, as if they were learning Portuguese or origami, was not “as if” or “like” anything, but just that, a fact, and not to be pressed for further significance. This was part of the agreement. They filled out the forms. Asked lawyer friends for language. Made stacks of books and towels. Cooked dinner together, said “excuse me” passing in the hallway, and even remembered each other’s mother’s birthdays. As if. Not as if. Waiting for their case to be called, they got hungry. The bailiff pointed toward the snack bar in the basement, which was packed with a class trip from the school for the blind. In illo tempore such a gift would have caused them to turn to each other in love and wonder. Now, no. They didn’t even look to see. She asked for fish sticks, and he wondered if fish sticks were fish or like fish. The children chewed their chicken fingers with calm deliberation, staring out at what they saw, then conveyed their limp paper plates with startling grace to the hinged swinging mouths of the trash cans which swallowed everything offered saying THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords, And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words.

A roadside inn. Lakeside dive. Spiffed up. End of a summer day. And I suppose I should be smiling beneficently at the families playing near the shore, their plastic balls and splashes and chatter. But my eye pivots left to a couple; he is carrying her into the water. He's strong enough, and she is light enough to be carried. I see how she holds her own, hugging his neck, his chest steady as his arms. I have never seen such a careful dunk, half-dunk, as he gives her. That beautiful play he makes lifting her from the water. And I suppose I should be admiring the sunset, all purple and orange and rose now. Nice porch here, too. Yeah, great view. But I have never seen such a loving carrying as he gives her. Imagine being so light as to float above water in love.

Although I can see him still— The freckled man who goes To a gray place on a hill In gray Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies— It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream— A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”

Their long stares mark them apart; eyes gone to sea-colors: gray, foam-flecked and black in the undertow, blue as the blue banners of  the mackerel, whipping west. On land, they are smoke-walkers, where each stone is a standing stone, every circle a stone circle. They would be rumor if they could, in this frozen landscape like a stopped sea, from the great stone keels of  Callanish to the walls of  Dunnottar and Drum. They would be less even than rumor: to be ocean-stealers, to never throw a shadow — to dream the blank horizon and dread the sight of  land. The drink storms through these men, uncompasses them, till they’re all at sea again. Their houses, heeled over in the sand: each ruin now a cairn for kites. And down by the quay past empty pots, unmended nets, and boats: this tiny bar, where men sleep upright in their own element, as seals.

The two of them stood in the middle water, The current slipping away, quick and cold, The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold, Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter. Maybe he regretted he had brought her— She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told— Perhaps a year ago, but now too old. Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her: To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails And fishes shelter in the undergrowth. And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth, Life and death weighed in the shining scales, The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

We sit on the spillway, the red and white bobbers lilted by the wind, while some force beneath the water brings everything to attention, the tight line, the echoed rings conjuring tension inside us. And when I touch the rod, a living strangeness, a quivering unseen tugs at my imagination, not receiving but sending some impulse down the line, into the muddy water, and when the sunfish erupts I've made the spangles of water the verdant scales, the shudder of tail fin and light. We build fish all afternoon, threading hooks, looping line into a tight noose, running gills down the stringer into an opalescent chain of glimmering emerald bodies. Soon our mothers will call with their icy vodka voices and we will carry them home like the weight of guilt, but for now night closes around us.