Daniel Fitzpatrick

Tackle

Along the brackish wall

rot crab nets,

cuts of braided line.

A cork squats in the brown water.

Someone’s left a trap intact. The clean cord

comes up taut, hauls sixteen fizzing shells

into the unfiltered sun, lets them

swim again so beautifully.

You wander off imagining the crisis

that could leave such fruits unplucked:

a heart attack, dog’s death, divorce,

imagining the morning in the birth of June

your father taught you how to crab,

to knot the turkey necks in nylon,

let the nets down through the dark

and give it fifteen minutes,

a good fifteen minutes,

and pull up tenderly, hand over hand,

and shake the shining claws into the bushel.

How they’d menace you, then, raising 

pincers to a sky that paled against

the azure of their shells.

That summer saw the record mako caught,

the one that hit a hundred pound tuna

at the midnight lump and bowed the bright rod

not to be unbent till the spool shone

and the knot popped, 

feckless as a dandelion root.

And the ragged jaws ranged off

dragging a hundred fathoms’ monofilament.

A charter trolled the loose end from the dark,

felt the flickering life, spliced it

to the heavy reel and saw,

hours later in the wasting sun,

the cold blue back, the black eyes

staring as they lashed the body to port

and labored up the heaving green of the Gulf.

The record books won’t show its thousand pounds.

But then again it’s often that the best 

of what we do begins in accident,

in plucking up an unimagined thread 

and taking its terrible revelation to the grave

like the hearse you saw later at the sea wall,

its silver snub nose staring over the waves

at a band of sky come round again 

like dawn beneath the April storms.

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel First Make Mad (Wipf & Stock), the poetry collections Yonder in the Sun (En Route) and Quarter Blend Polly (Resource), and Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature. He lives in New Orleans and edits Joie de Vivre.