#85:Two Poems by Daniel Bosch

~This poem previously appeared in Turnstile (1991).

Mackerel

—and Roy came up from his deck chair shouting "God-

dam, boy! This is really living!" and reeling back

hard, the cold bottle of Heineken between his legs

splashing his plaid shorts and falling to the deck

of his immaculate Ramblin', just as the fish,

curving into bright hooks, the stripes on its sides

fracturing gray into light, liquid as anything living

underwater could be, and free on twenty feet

of fifteen-pound test taut from a struck rod,

came aboard, vertical, flashing, twisting, writing its name,

mackerel, and landing so hard it spattered

blood over the ice chest which was half full of ice

but roomy enough for the fish to slap itself cold.

Roy was out of breath, but "Goddam!"—another fish,

on the other line, the glas whipped to the gunwale

and the spool giving with a whine—"You take her, boy,"

Roy said, pointing, and I knew he meant the pole,

the fish, not the wheel already in my hands.

So I let her go and picked her up, and Roy

fell across the deck chair he'd forgotten

he'd been sitting in trying to take over the helm,

and she, Ramblin', bucked into a swell

rolling under us, and past us, toward the coast,

the color of wet sand. There we were,

right where everything changes:  old man, fish,

and beer bottle in a reckless dance, twin Merc's

stuttering on troll, and me, for the first time,

at fifteen, with a her in my hands not wanting

to be steered or shifted; for whom, once hooked,

there was no reverse, no leaving the dance floor

terrified and ashamed because I'd pressed

my awkward, unmediated body against hers.

"Goddam," I'd said, walking home. Too soon?

Too hard? What did you have to do or be?

Cool? I had friends said they merely jerked 

them in—"Tip up, boy!" Roy was screaming, "Tip up!"

hardly in control.  I planted my feet on the deck,

foamy in an inch of Gulf and beer. "She's yours,

boy, don't let her get away!"—but she pulled

much harder than I ever wanted to believe

she would, and then she broke the water, spectral,

duplicating Roy's fish but further out and further off

Ramblin's starboard, as if the time between

his fish and mine were a mirror angled up and away,

and the mackerel danced there, three-quarters of an inch

of metal threading its mouth, seeming a part,

somehow, of the pole straight up in my hands, and suddenly

the gulls above it scried, and it was if they spoke

for the whole goddam run of mackerel, hundreds of them,

blue and yellow, we were running across. I wanted

to see her snap, to twist, to flash, and so I jerked back

hard and she came flying in at me, hard and wet

and shivering water from her body, and the blood—

*****

 

~This poem previously appeared in Apalachee Quarterly  (1985).

Salads Are Like Children, Or Cars

Mother grits her teeth cutting lettuce

Like father does when he comes

Out of the bathroom, fumbling with damp pants.

Carrots, too, receive her undivided.

“Salads are like children, or cars,” she says,

“They always look better with a generous use of color.

Why, I remember summers full of picnics and salads

And dancing under painted moons from Japan.”

I had an aunt that winced

When mother raised her bowl to the window.

She had made the same salad. “You shouldn’t have

gone to the trouble” she said, as we pulled up next to them. 

Her husband was rapping his knuckles on the wheel

and watching his shirt untuck when she added,

“You know, sometimes I crimp my radishes.” 

My brother covered his ears and howled.

Hungry, father parked next to a convertible.

My brother tumbled over the front seat, and ran.

I followed, but the car door was serious

About making salad. It needed the color red from my hand. 

My brother tried twice, but the door would not close.

The car grit its grill and choked on my bones.

“Quit fucking with the car,” said my father, his mouth full.

“Boys will be boys,” said my aunt. “And wives wives,” said mother.

The rest of the picnic was just like ice at night.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEMS

“Salads Are Like Children, Or Cars” was composed in1984 as a gift for my parents, who were coming to visit me and my best friend where we house-sat for a much-admired professor.  It is one of those rare poems that came to me quite quickly.  I read the poem aloud to my parents as we drank some wine before dinner. They were well aware that my own hand had been slammed in a car door by my older brother when he was five or six years old. The poem is cinematic in an elliptical way, something like a music video;  just enough narrative is provided so that the reader is partially satisfied.  The irregularity of the lines and the exceedingly deliberate punning at the ends of lines attests to a particular moment in my long apprenticeship to the line of verse—a moment that hasn’t ended.

            Most of “Mackerel” is more or less a versified transcript of an early morning fishing expedition, probably also in 1984.  The memories of tensions about high school dances that occur to the speaker of the poem about halfway through that transcript is something like a xenolithic inclusion such as might be found in a rock that was sought for some other quality. The inclusion seems to me to be the weakest aspect of the poem, perhaps not for any inherent reason, but because of the heavy overuse of such remembered narratives as the basis for reader emotion in American poetry from the 1970s forward.

*****

ABOUT DANIEL BOSCH

Daniel Bosch’s collection Crucible was published by Other Press in 2002.  His poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Slate, Agni, The Paris Review, The TLS, The New Republic, Plume, and The Istanbul Review, and his poems riffing on movies “starring Tom Hanks” were awarded the first Boston Review Poetry Prize in 1998.