Casting along the sand after the fish,
you ran, aiming to club a great blue-
fish at the water’s edge;
then, ankles in salt, gaffed a bass,
late in the day, ran the shore,
drove home in a pick-up, scaled it, went in, and shut the door.

I might have come and hung around your screen door
while the moon came out, and you ate your fish
in kitchen light lying against the blue
blacking night, with your humming a sound the deep bass
of the ocean thickened at the still sand’s edge,

as it pounded salty at the sand’s edge,
sending cold and fish and rhythm to your door,
calling its melodies of mackerel and bass,
flounder and cod, skate, goosefish, dogfish,
halibut, swordfish, shark, eel, blue-
fish, calling you to come back out to shore;
then I might have seen you come back out to shore,

walking with your jacket to the sea’s edge
to look at the noisy black smell of gray-blue
gone dark, and at seaweed in the dark, and back at your yellow door,
and to remember the taste of fish, to think of the taste of fish,
and of salt, and of clubbing and gaffing the bass.

It took you a long afternoon to find the bass,
club it, gaff it, and drag to the shore
the flopping, eyed, scaled, wet stabbed silver fish,
sandy with its dragging from the ocean’s edge.
When you put it in the pick-up in the wind and shut the door,
it was colder, the sky and waves were darkening from blue,

And you thought of home in the darkening blue,
home, corn, chowder—and the bass
spiced by the sea coming in the screen door,
warmed by the cold wind blowing from shore,
at night, with cold noise at the edge,
and out from the edge, ocean blind, full of fish

that swim black, blue, cold, far from shore;
halibut, cod, far from the edge
of your door, where you watched the waves.

First published in West Branch (U.S.), in Ars Interpres (Sweden), and in Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Carolyn Beard Whitlow and Marilyn Krysl, Dartmouth College Press, 2013.