Fish head, well body minus the meat, filleted, with the guts hanging about
scales, scraped and piled on the old boards, in the wet sand
where the ever slightly running, spigot drips.
And flies, sitting quietly on the intestines
buzzing up at a nearby motion
only to settle back again
to what I can guess,
eating remains
today the fish,
one of god’s
creatures
swam with
all the grace
and speed of nature,
rippling and sparkling
against, above, beneath,
and through the clear green-blue
intra-coastal waters just south of the
bridge built by Civilian Conservation Corps
at the beginning of the war that ended most
of all the wars of Europe, at least, as they struggled
to end the Great Depression, and yet, those men are
as dead as the glorious fish, and they were glorious, too.
He is surely supper, and a good one, too, if I were eating him.
They are only dead, with their wives and half their kids, not heroes,
only trying to keep from dying too soon, and maybe they did, but died
anyway, and the flies eat the entrails and the old men’s bones rot beneath.