I have finally caught you on my line. I'm still young, we have years to go
once you're in the boat with me, once I've convinced you how to breathe,
how to shed your scales and grow legs, how to skate on ice and hold my hand.
For a time, I know you'll not understand why I've taken you. I won't say
I'm sorry I pilfered you from wherever you were before.
Had you another wife? Another daughter? A job you liked?
Somehow, I think it was oil rigs, or perhaps piracy. I know how you love
the sea, but I want my father. We'll fight at times, like we are now;
you on the hook, me clutching the reel. I'll hold you gingerly
in my hands while I wrestle the hook from your lips,
smeared with my bait; the thin shreds of a lonely girl's heart.
Please don't smack my hands with your tail, please don't twitch
toward the water. When we get home, you'll begin to learn again
how to be a father and this time, it'll work. Lord knows how long
I've tried to catch you, the lengths I have gone. I sang for you
on the rocks of the jetty. I chummed the water with warm laughter.
At midnight, one time, I stole a can of tobacco from the Seven Eleven
and dunked it into the tidepools where I saw you finning the water.
I kept a pinch, chewed, and spat as far as I could. I dug sand pits,
flung chicken thighs soaked in sugar and beer at the waves.
I laid crab traps lined with my old baby pictures. I even cast
with your old Beatles cassette on my hook. I got close that time,
I heard a low sound lifting through the water. It sounded like
a fence falling down in a field, like a sigh, like twigs unspooling
from a nest. A little like me, even. Like you were never really gone.