Faking to the Bitter End:

Faking to the Bitter End:

Whereon faking means coiling the line

in a figure eight fashion so the line will run free

without tangles and the bitter end means

the free end of the line.

I wonder, though, if it happened

to you too, when you stepped or

rode into that clearing and could see

the old house up the long lane

if your stomach didn’t coil

the way I’ve seen snakes coil

around and around and around

so they took on the look

of a bundle of rope, what we’d see

at the cove at the beginning
of and through the lobster

season.  And all the tools of it:

traps nets sour bait all sorted

when it was safe for him to put

the boat in.  And he’d be gone

to it then, tide after tide,

setting and pulling and bringing in

all that lobster or two or three crabs or a mess

of clams he’d dug waiting in the slack

so he could get back at it

or painting the bleached buoy blaze

orange, as though he could justify

being off in the woods in his mind

as if it were November and the doe

he’d been seeing after the season 

and into spring grazing at the old apple 

tree, the one he never let us touch (but we’d

sneak anyway and he was gone

so what did we care) he would think
she'd come right up to him and eat straight out

of his damaged hand and lick

the place his pinky and the run

of his ulnar nerve and been cut

away and that was when we

were playing a day or two after

Christmas and he’d fallen off

the cat-walk and down into bolted

down machines, secured to the floor

so they wouldn’t dance on out

of there because if they did

the mill would be lost forever past
all those layoffs and then some, 

and so where would all the men

go?  So it was just him then

and after that he wouldn’t be

the same.  He raged sometimes

and he was a royal bastard in his pain
Mum said and most of the time later too.  And after

that he never hunted again.  The house

became, don’t you agree, a tomb

and all the people in it dead or waiting

to die and at night he’d wake up

screaming snakes snakes and today

I still don’t know if it was the nerve
he'd lost or if it was because

he watched too many westerns

while hopped up on morphine

seeing  all the snakebit cowbows

go down in the dirt after disturbing

a nest of copperheads or if it was

all the tubes and lines going in and

out of him while he bled and bled

and wavered about waiting to be

resuscitated and maybe wondering

if he even wanted to be because is

a wife and four kids enough to want

to stick it out handless for, and at only

38?  And could he imagine then

getting well enough to walk through

row after row of coiled rope and lay

money down on an old boat and go out

alone on all that open ocean to look into

it on a glass glass morning and see

himself for the first time that day

and say I’m staying goddamit I’m staying

and step out of the warp and let

the rope go alone with the trap

his body that day at least not needing

to follow it no matter how drunk

a wife at home is no matter how broke

his hand and the heart of it all is

because isn’t that doe right now

reaching out her tongue for an apple

on a low branch and isn’t her lamb

nursing and letting go to run

nursing and letting go to run

but always there beside or sometimes

coiled in the cottongrass and new

shoots of alders?