Deep in your oyster-size brain
is a hatred for sharks,
hunger for jellyfish and crabs,
perfect memory for the sands
of the hatching beach.
 
You're bad luck, with that barnacle mouth,
plucking ice age sponges
from bottom mud, nearsighted cooter
of the coral reefs. They say
you drum a storm on boat decks.
 
But you'll die lunging after plastic bags,
jaw thick with fishhooks
you've eaten the bait from.
Your young will crawl toward the light
they think is moonlit sea—
 
pavement glittering with headlights.
A jeep will eat the eggs
ghost crabs cannot find. You'll butt
your nose raw on aquarium walls,
snap dangled fingers like snailshells.
 
With breath so foul the shrimp-men gag,
a limitless gut, carapace
sharp to slice their nets
and free a day's catch, you're swimming
to beaches that have washed away.
 
They say turtle steak won't rest
in the pan, that it takes you
a week to die. They have seen you,
three-legged from old shark bites,
climb crookedly out of the surf
 
straight into a poacher's machete.
They have seen you headless, dropping eggs.

Grandmothers begin calling
to upstairs neighbors
dead in the fire of 1930.
For years the camera stutters,
then issues a clear command.
You never can tell
when your dog will rouse
to growl all night
at the open window.
Sometimes drunk you see
a darkening in the face of a friend,
and you want to sit all night
on a rock singing—
want to watch death happen,
with the quiet of rain
falling through the air,
watch it come  down from the attic,
electric ball down carpeted stairs
and out the front door.
When you blink you are apt
to be hustled down the gangplank
in New York, ashamed
of your accent and heavy shoes,
or you may simply stop your car,
get out, and vanish
into the factories torn down yesterday.
These glimmerings 
of all there is to know—
perhaps tonight you will find
the single condom in your father's drawer,
far back under the socks
and cracked with age.

Grandfather was not much
of a fan of anything but polka
and church music—his radio
mostly talk, and that was weird,
he himself not being a listener,
or talker for that matter.
But he was a loon in his own
fashion, liked to sit out
on the porch in his old-man
underwear, took up knitting
when he retired, and drank
a slug of scotch with an aspirin
dissolved in his prune juice
every night before bed.
 
When he died his old pals
from the factory shuffled
once past his coffin, then out
to the parking lot of the 
funeral home, dragging on
their cigarettes and telling
smutty jokes, hushing
just barely when a woman
or child would walk by.
And that cloud of old breath
and Camel smoke
in the slushy parking lot
was Grandfather's obituary,
then and now, amen.