Ampullae of Lorenzini

I don’t know how sharks tell time.
I like to think it is possible
through the same organ
they can sense electric fields,
the same organ that peeled
away long before my cousins
fled the trees, slowly trailing
the herd to the edge of the water,
to a memory, a glimpse
of silver and speed and death.
A fear laced tight in DNA,
a horizon broken by a single tooth.

I like to imagine
that the story about sharks
and a drop of blood isn’t true.
That my fictional
bleeding fingers
are just waving away those dead eyes.
I’m imagining I’m in a boat
accident, rubber lungs,
my pasta salad down
a blubbered throat. The rusty edge
of the rail digging into my tiny
man hands.

The first bite would be
burning sand. Not screaming,
not acceptance,
but an understanding.
Mouth-to-flesh handshake.
I know the shark
can feel the electric
kick in my muscles. Drinks
it in, a quench, a savor.
For 450 million years,
it waited in the void
for me to lean over the
charter boat’s air-brushed sides.

Selection from Night Poems

I am in the half-built bed, frame
of metal, where mattress meets
washed sheets. Out the window,
down the highway, the river
pushes: broken branch, horde
of bottles, carcass of pigeon.
A thin film of regret
laps the shore, the frame
of row home, of museum,
of light that sits in shadow.

The din of the TV, quiet children
in bedrooms, the anxiety
under my skin, a choking victim,
a sinking bus, the slow
tap of a single key. I can hear
the click of a fingernail,
before the sound appears.
No imagination can pull
me away, the slow boiling
of a river, of love, of everything
into the singularity of night.

The Exception

I’ll pretend

that word died, capsized

in Hurff Lake. The duck

boat’s seatbelt rusted shut

as she made out with Dorsey

on the blanket, her hands

down his trunks. 

I’ll dry myself

off, walk past, my sticky clay-streaked

legs warped together.

I don’t look. Her lips wet, the sound

of tongues around the rolling

clouds past the lake houses.

Move past, quickly towards the pavilion. 

They don’t mean anything.

Pretend that feeling is just

the first drops of cold rain.