Saying Grace

Saying Grace

As though to mock and haunt me, late

that summer the corn and the peas, like pails of pearl

essence, pails and pails, glowed.  In their mothered

shellac, (their gilled breath choked then bruised to liquid

ooze) I remember the way you’d run your knife, blade back-

ward, scaling the foot long body of the fish.  See

the sheen?  How it’s a phantom at your feet?    But these

corn and peas, are seeds,

shucked and shelled and steaming, these and new

potatoes, (but the beet greens and chards, they’re as good

as come and gone long before the boat…) still

how now their roots and tubers should bulge

in my mouth, how they should find their way

into this blessing, before

meat if we have any.  But all the boiled or stewed begins

to go cold as the press of my head into the split

knuckles and lips, and the butter melts

soft then goes spongy on the knuckles of peas, and they gleam

and then, like those fish, go opaque in the eye,

in the gill, gone in their ecstasy of grip,

in their flap and fillet for air.  My suitable prayer:  it’s nothing

but frayed padding under the kneeler hooked to the pew.  

I’ll never bend there again. Not now since the lake. 

Not now since that water.  Not now since

he’s beneath it all but up the road.  Grace is that

cataracts of fog, pearl liquid… grace is pearl blob burnt

into resin the factory crucible.  It bakes against itself

and then, when it’s scraped, like full plates gone cold,

can only fall into the open dark, fall fall into God’s

broad and gobbing throat of dark.