New Smyrna Beach, Florida
	
Sometimes the shark would go away, sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
							Quint, Jaws

I wish it were on all day, 
every day, like an aquarium, 
to remind me of all those summers 
up to my neck in the Atlantic, 
then the many mornings in the dark, 
in the Gulf, up to my heart, 
shuffling past the stingrays. 

I never really worried, 
even after I’d felt the tug at my waist, 
lifted the stringer to see only the bitten end, 
all those speckled sea trout, 
taken in one gulp. 

Now they call the beach,
where my cousin and I rode the waves
for hours, The Shark-Bite Capital
of the World.

Even before I knew what irony meant,
I knew that suburb of Atlanta, 
unlike its namesake in antiquity,
could devour me, though never dreamed
back then how quickly things unseen 
could rise from down below, 
and how you could hear 
not get out, now, but
Happy are those who are called 
to his supper.
                        

Since I can’t afford to fish 
the summer surf anymore, 
and everything here in the corn belt
has wilted, colored khaki as old lettuce 
by now, I’m longing for that light 
in August that foretells the fall. 
And though I also hate holidays,
Halloween seems like a harlequin 
heaven at this distance. 

Near here is a road where something sad 
happened, though none of the Amish 
remember what. 
No nook anywhere, but the Dutch 
is spuk hus, maybe a weathered barn 
crumbling amid the brown cornstalks,
the scabrous scarecrows only spooky
silhouettes at the full moon, when 
the local kids, sick of summer too,
tell stories of headless horsemen,
or maybe hear the wind wheeze 
through the bones of someone hanging
from a gnarled oak, a seduced 
and abandoned suicide, 
or some old fisherman. swinging 
far from the sound of the sea.