Lowell and Bishop: Gone Fishing

From a distance, the bridge tricks the eye,

seems much smaller: that splash echoing

across the bay, once-off like starlight,

happened earlier; nearby, present, a fish

flips in a muscular try at a skimmer,

the bug wrinkles through a light transparent

grill on the water, surging, sculling against

the current, against time: no, that was a body

hitting the water, the thin chirrup of splash

last fool-fire sound as she began to drown,

if not already dead, heart shock-stopped,

or spine snapped, senses failing, pricked by pain,

her blouse and skin peeled back on impact.

A seal dips its whiskers to watch this shape

sink in its slow rictus; 70 feet down lungs collapse;

how soon the air grows rich with bodies falling,

a shower that begins with a single drop

but the air quickly thick with blurred faces

all in the last moment of dropped lives,

thoughts blood-shot down Skull Road,

worlds of ideas all contained in this world,

that world.

Still, from a distance, splashes

might only be rain picking up in the mist,

rain louder mangled in the current pouring

through the bridge supports.

In a row-boat beneath the bridge,

Robert Lowell sees the water in layers of time,

poem parts, Lethe and Styx and Atlantic.

He’s fishing with Elizabeth who ignores bodies,

wants to catch dinner, but Lowell lowers his rod,

trails his slack line just out of sight in the mist,

where it enters the bay invisibly, only tiny drops

running down the gut to tell where it is.

Between Lowell’s knees, their secret impossible

love-child. To her, he points out the rivers and oceans

this might be, all dying become drowning,

death sambas across the crowded bay-bottom,

goaded on by waving unrescued skeletons.

But the girl, exurb of Boston and Nova Scotia,

Brahmin, orphan, favors the mother: ignores

Lowell and Bishop: Gone Fishing (continued)

mythology, collects values of grey worked out

between fog and sea, the stripes of a mood,

ink-shot value of dark ash air

that solidifies in the last moment hanging

over the tide, drawing up water it drags down;

and then grey in motion, unskeining, rewound

and clumped, bitten into like spun-sugar,

palpable fog beneath the surface,

the way light tricks out over the shifting depths.

A flare thrown down to mark the spot, primitive fire

burning under water, like volanic rock flaming

from cracks in the earth on the ocean floor:

fire besting water, floating to where the body bobs up,

already great with bloat, hair matted like grass,

face fixed down, limp arms lightly stretched out

as if still preparing for impact;

the girl follows seals

that have found this latest victim, curiosity not ghastly,

but animal liveliness quick with human interest:

boat approaching with a hook, the craning crowd above,

a quiet girl in a boat with her mom and dad,

a quiet girl who sees the dead right there

in front of us, nothing at all like a picture.