Delicate Bait

The shell of the meal broken
and sucked clean, the ocean
chewing up the beach beyond the palms
made it seem that eating a simple meal
there by the ocean at night
on an island heaved up millennia ago
in fiery explosions, and the fish
having leapt out of the same water,
bodies of a movement of that sea,
ocean larger than anything
on earth, would suffice. That we should come
and go, eating the few thousand meals,
a few hundred fish, a room full of grains,
that we should put the world in our mouths
and swallow, become the fish,
the deer, the goat, the field of wheat,
walking graveyard with no stones, body of death
and the world. Out of the fish
and our sitting there, out of our
being together briefly in that place,
our scattered and gathered trying-to-be,
one to the other, less evanescent,
less brief and accidental, something,
so that when, in the impending hour,
oblivious, hour of cancellation and woe,
we turned back to our lives, whatever they were,
we would have, or keep, maybe a phrase,
a sense of the light, the look
of the fish arranged on its bier of rice,
the voice of the ocean, continuous, around us,
the burning of that hour together, something,
something even memory cannot reach,
wave that rolls across an ocean
only to fall gratefully onto the sand.

On the north side of the island,
region of small icons and cairns,
in the voice of that place, tumble
of rock back into the sea from which it came,
people stack one rock on another,
two or three, a cluster,
sometimes a single rock set out alone
on the edge of that other rock,
the island itself, saying here,
a flame in a red dress, I was here, and the fish
is a part of my body, and I thank
the fish and the cook and the person
who brought it to me and those
at the other tables making cairns
out of words and gestures,
glances in every direction.
It was beginning to slide, wash
back into the silence from which it came.
It was happening to me, to us,
and I was watching it, lifted
one fork at a time into my mouth,
into the mouths of the others, those
I was with, those I was almost with,
those gone and going before,
those for whom I am the one going before,
scattering, as when alarmed,
not scattering really, but moving just beyond
the ends of our fingers,
when, swimming among them,
we reach out to touch them,
almost become one ourselves,
fish in the sea.
And, that more delicate bait,
the you and the me.

Planting Trees

I planted trees last summer, seedling pines,
in a place cleared for hay two hundred years
ago. She calls it a grove already,
and promises to put my ashes there.
I say, OK, but can't imagine death.
Not mine, not yet. Besides, we're here, still here.
The soil is sandy, easy to dig into.
The pines aren't fussy. They put their roots down
anywhere. Almost anywhere. The snow
bends them to the ground, but they spring back straight,
if they don't crack. And even if they do,
they shrug it off, a branch here, a trunk there.
The coolness they make in summer, the wind's
soughing. Imagine! Among those little pines.

Strange Bloom

There's a car parked at the side of the house
so deep in weeds you'd think they'd found a way
to bring the twentieth century back
from its errand to the moon. Strange bent blossom
of rust and chrome dangle off the stalk
of summer. The gas pump by the walk
says nineteen cents. A gallon of that air
would go a nickel in Niagara Falls.
And yes, you can go back to griddlecakes.
The griddle's in the grass there. A hog pen
full of strangled mud swoops backward to a field
where forty kinds of weed play keepaway.
Who was it draped the snake across the doorknob?
Who was it made that feral bloom
of smashed glass in the fireplace,
flame of damnation and indifference?
The dentist in town, twenty miles away,
who bought the whole idea of the past,
says when you ask him, even kindly, no.
Not to you, but to something that your voice
over the phone at night brings back to him.
Moonlight over the unpainted clapboard fence
and a life he knew he'd one day have to buy
and drop there, rotting, where he found it.
You say you understand, and maybe you do.

Roger Mitchell is the author of seven previous works of poetry and a work of nonfiction.  His work has receivd several awards plus two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.  His work has appeared in more than thirty anthologies. He taught for many years in the English department at Indiana, University-Bloomington.

Roger Mitchell's poems "are rich in detail, masterly in execution, and always a good read.  He is savvy about the way we Americans live and try to make sense of our lives in this moment in history."—Charles Simic

The above poems were taken from Mitchell's latest book, Delicate Bait (Winner of the 2002 Akron Poetry Prize / The University of Akron Press)

ForPoetry