Rob COOK

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SONG FOR THE EXTINCTION OF WINTER (ii)



Each dawn the fishing boats return
from the moon like I do with the gulls
in my pillow and the nickels I cut out
of the sea grass, letters I've composed
to the snow buried inside lobsters, snow
that will become the floor of the Atlantic,
and I am the spine my father caught for me
beyond the coral, beyond the sandflies, beyond
the furnace and the clotheslines and the voluptuous
shivering of kelp
outside the kitchen whose young mollusks fed me
until I shriveled into a man, and now I carry
the forks to the beach where they dive and mate
and grow fins again, now I have buckets of debts
I throw to the barnacles, now I hold lighthouses within me,
now freighters blink past the harbors and the eels who
left them here with their beautiful drowning

where I am digging up the sand, the tide, the lifeguard's
nest, where I am the cormorant at first light untangling its bride.



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