Flatfish
The last hours of night are the coldest and the worst If you have guard duty. That chill goes right through you, When your insides turn into gull-shattered clams if you're awake. Even in Arizona, in the desert, it can feel like that. Soldiers have told me this, men who have felt the cold of duty Even when there was no threat, no danger of being overtaken or undone. Desert watches taught Dad about silence and waking. No enemy came. I awake during one of those coldest hours every day. I sit in the Crow's nest I have made of the kitchen and look out the window To the blank sea and watch it roll back as the great, Golden ship, starboard, glides into dawn and drowns night. In its yellow wake before it goes up in pink flames, I see me and Dad After had had tapped my door long before he had to be up for work Or I, who worked nights in a ball-bearing factory, had to be up at all. We went down tot he Sound to flat fish in the Large-dropped, light-scattered rain of just before dawn an