In the Year of “No Work”

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring, to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick, the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering with the scales of the dead while the line whined free from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current on a point in view of   the town where I lived, where I had become a man with no money, suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths and I had helped to make them — The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my whole body taut though a man a few down the row laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish than he could take. I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing, who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even, finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free. I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one. I baited my line and thought of a woman who would carry my body over the threshold of our small white house simply with her eyes because I had brought something home, for her, for us, our boys at my side while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many — (Now to sift the facts for truth): I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it. Darkling saltwater for a dream and no other place to be.