Cleaning a Fish

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.