From the Fishouse

After crabpots are baited and dropped, the Sound’s flat brown
surface blooms, bulbs of fish-gut oils rise up and flatten, thick

concentric prisms breaking into a skrim diffused all through the current.
How a tide is excluded from repetition’s usual tension, avoiding the numb

horror a repeated thing can become, has everything to do with
where I grew up and who was around. Belhaven. Edmund Tillet

jet-skied through a dying waterspout and became the memory of that
specific idiot who swore he wouldn’t do that again to save his life, a paradox

plenty evident when he broke his collarbone during the next storm. I felt
glad that I could rely on hearing different versions of his story with that same laughing

contempt for good sense he’d show his regret for by insisting he couldn’t
help it, or by slowly pouring out his beer and getting another. As I’d learned

from my father, grandmother was a hundred different ligatures of ma,
tense and out of the way in a porch glider, green, its thinning nylon weave

fit perfect to her bottom. If she weren’t there, she was somewhere
not too far away. A necessity. Sitting because her arthritic knees swelled

all the time aged her quickly, again the daily chore of staying put until
stillness became excessive and, unafraid of dying, she began to follow

college basketball. Especially in March, when every game was a crucial
scheduled event for which she had specific and separate expectations,

there was the security that she’d be by her television, debunking the brackets’
match-ups, her knuckles impatient, penciling-in the welcome upset.