House of Shadows. Home of Simile

One afternoon of summer rain my hand skimmed a shelf and I found an old florin. Ireland, 1950. We say like or as and the world is a fish minted in silver and alloy, an outing for all the children, an evening in the Sandford cinema, a paper cone of lemonade crystals and say it again so we can see androgyny of angels, edges to a circle, the way the body works against the possible— and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends. I am holding two whole shillings of nothing, observing its heaviness, its uselessness. And how in the cool shadow of nowhere a salmon leaps up to find a weir it could not even know was never there.