In the Year of “No Work”

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stakemy spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in thebucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring,to fit the skull cap and pierce the eye with a toothpick,the body double hooked, my fingertips glimmeringwith the scales of the dead while the line whined freefrom the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal currenton a point in view of the town where I lived,where I had become a man