Catch

1. Grey Mullet

Their mouths were small, lips too soft
to tether a run, or bear their weight
when hoisted up by hook alone.
I never owned a landing net, but read the book
and rolled the crumb of bread
into a seed of dough that hid the hook.
Sometimes the bait would dance
like a table at a séance, until it fell away,
eclipsed. More often, they just hovered
by the steps, around green chains,
scaling the distance between boat and shadow,
oblivious, as if they listened out
for someone to arrive, enthralled
by a sound on the edge of their hearing.

2. Flounder

You, who started out like any other fish,
suffer vertigo, crawl the seabed
like the top-floor landing of an old hotel,
your eyes’ migration a slow study in
distrust. Beware, this stony wallflower
is not a walkover but a foot
shocker in the shallows, a flying plate
that shimmies home. Not an easy catch,
but caught, there’s no letting it go.
You rise from the depths like an old letter,
a slip of vulnerability I’ve watched
lads stamp on when they’ve failed to free the hook
you took too deep, your bite a slight
nudge, as if to test a sleeping lover.

3. Snorkelling

You pinch and suck but cannot seal the mask:
the first upending lets a slip of water in
as if the sea already were at eye-level.
Yet you can breathe: a storm of spittle
rattles in the snorkel. Here are the places
where you laid your traps, the paternosters
and French booms, fluttering like prayer
flags at the desert’s edge. A wrasse
strikes the far-off wall of your presence
and reverberates into ocean. You bite
the plug as if going under, and then you are,
against the volume of yourself,
for a lonely stone, a glint of destination,
your voice ridiculous as you hold it up.