Derek Sheffield

In Japan, when you die, they wheel what’s left of you out of the incinerator, and what’s left of your family takes turns picking with special chopsticks. It looks like they have gathered to dine over a dead campfire, but they are not, of course, eating you. They are feeding you to the round mouth of an urn: only in pieces, Father, to the fire. In their bright swimsuits, my daughters spill warm sand over my skin as I lie still, watching the sun needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers to tell, perhaps, if I am ready, her bald head white with lotion, her mouth full of vowels. The older one says nothing above the ocean’s slow rush, but scoops and pats to get me done and gone. I’ve never been to Japan, but once, a globe of glass found me at the clear end of a wave. It drifted from the other side, my mother said. Cold and slick, it glistened as I held it up with both hands and looked through to the green flames of the sun before tasting the salt with my tongue.

You’ve planted and weeded and wheelbarrowed, now tapping a pencil, trying to remember the next thing—what was it?—when a shape drops from the sky, shudders and stops at a tree—red blotch—whack, whack. A creature big enough on this slow spring day to make you mutter,

Jerk that bitch, urges my guide, and I give my shuddering pole a jerk, hooking the throat of the first steelhead of my life. Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor. I horse my pole and reel and horse. The boat's mascot whines, her claws clicking.Let it take some line. My father, uncle, and cousin are reeling.First fish! they shout, and I shout,What a fighter! A silver spine touches the air. There, he points,a hen. And guess what? She's gonna join the club, somehow spotting in that glimpse the smooth place along her back where a fin had been snipped. He leans over the gunwale, dips a net, and scoops her into the boat. She is thick with a wide band of fiery scales, slap- slapping the aluminum bottom. Welcome to the club, he says, and clobbers her once, and again, and once more before she goes still. A bleeder, he says, shaking his head and handing her to me. I curl a finger through a gill the way you're supposed to, determined not to let her slip and flop back to the river, a blunder I'd never live down. A good fist. Fish, I mean. A good fish.

The animal of winter is dying, its white body everywhere in collapse and stabbed at by straws of   light, a leaving to believe in as the air slowly fills with darkness and water drains from the tub where my daughter, watching it lower around her, feeling it go, says about the only thing she can as if it were a long- kept breath going with her blessing of dribble and fleck. Down it swirls a living drill vanishing toward a land where tomorrow already fixes its bright eye on a man muttering his way into a crowd, saying about the only thing he can before his body goes boom. And tomorrow, I will count more dark shapes tumbling from the sky, birds returning to scarcity, offering in their seesawing songs a kind of   liquidity.