Cleaning a Fish

By Dave Smith b. 1942 Dave Smith

In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw,

shaves the flesh. It grazes the white

belly just over the heart.

Underneath, the coiled fingers

are cradling a soft flesh

as if it were the jowls of the aged

man propped for a while on the bench in the park.

The head is not severed, the eyes not out.

Blue, they appear to flash odd ways

where a tree makes a live shadow.

Mostly the eyes are dead.

Nothing is in them

except the intense blue of sky the tree allows.

There is no conspiring of nerves,

no least event recalled

by a limb’s high arching,

or even a girl’s ascension

from a forgotten distance of water.

But there is something as she lifts the meat.

It is enough to draw down her gaze.

Now her arm rises against

yellow hair fallen

white in a childish face.

She is still as a leaf barely clinging.

I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass

and touch her to see the startled,

upthrusted gleam of her face.

At brow and each cheek

like gathered beads of mist

scales leap with the sun, and are dead.

No word passes between us, but something electric

as a flash of steel makes her

cry out just once. Squatting

at the yard’s edge, she

sings beyond any thought.

Her knife flies as lethal as love

and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.

Source: The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (1985)

Biography

Poet, novelist, critic, and editor Dave Smith was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. The first member of his family to graduate from college, Smith received a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from Southern Illinois University, and a PhD from Ohio University. Smith has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992–2004 and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000, . . .

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