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In white-gesso sunlight, I ignore
The cackle of the first snipe.
Gulls dive, banking
Like Chinese kites towards a fisherman
Casting among them. The gull’s eyes,
Glass black, inspect
The treble-hooked plug, easily mistaken
For a flying bug. Like an awkward
Phrase, as if flying backwards,
A pelican lopes airborne and swoops
At the lure, shoveling it into its gullet.
A moored boat sways.
Waves yank at the sand-fisted anchor.
The fisherman pulls
The rod back, as if it were a flying fish,
To the wheeze of the spitting reel.
The pelican mocked by the teasing snipe
Tumbles in the line.
In the sea, the fish weave asylum,
Safe in the branches of the coral;
A pocked and ruddy
Forest around a missing island;
Gulls over empty water, circling
Sunken ivory columns
Cracked by water’s weight
Where unmapped obsidian and marble
Lunettes are inscribed, Secundum Naturam.
I snip the line,
Easy as that, and everything is forgotten,
The sea trout swimming in their bastion,
Where the dock’s legs grow
Scaly with periwinkle,
Where jellyfish
Eggs bob and the yellowfish and the blues
Slip through the torn netting
Of the old trawler.
David Koehn's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a wide range of journals, including Bitter Oleander, Artful Dodge, Painted Bride, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Three Candles, Poetry Midwest, Wisconsin Review, Southern Indiana Review, Confluence, and Alaska Quarterly. He won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest, held by Permafrost. As an undergraduate, he won the Carnegie Mellon Press award in Poetry. His longer manuscript, now retired, was a finalist in both The Bluestem Award and the National Poetry Series competitions.
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