People Poems

	Fisher Boys We were washing our faces The water was still and cold And dawn bleached our fingertips The air bruised by lung heat Snaked from our mouths and then Imagined the smoke of cigars When our hands scooped blue cups Of mountain shards the shiver Creased our mouths in fake smiles And flakes of dawn's cool tincture Spun off in alcoholic swoons Smelling as charred as summer grass The rocks were smooth as apples Windfall hard and deep cold As the arctic snout of a glacier Where subterranean archaic Bacteria hollowed the ice flows And seals tapped like manic masons And the minnows flirting here In water between our toes Might freeze silent as a broken mirror There we dammed the water's pulse With ligatures of scree and sedge And cracked the fish with cane So that the water gilt by dandy dawn Fractured on the belly laughs Of shoeless boys and flying fish © David Incoll 2001
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