Incident

     for Louis Asekoff

Mid-October, Massachusetts. We drive   

through the livid innards of a beast—dragon   

or salamander—whose home is fire. The hills   

a witch’s quilt of goldrust, flushed cinnamon,

wine fever, hectic lemon. After dark,

while water ruffles, salted, in a big pot, we four   

gather towards the woodfire, exchanging   

lazy sentences, waiting dinner. Sunk   

in the supermarket cardboard box,

the four lobsters tip and coolly stroke each other   

with rockblue baton legs and tentative

antennae, their breath a wet clicking, the undulant   

slow shift of their plated bodies   

like the doped drift of patients   

in the padded ward. Eyes like squished berries

out on stalks. It’s the end of the line

for them, yet faintly in that close-companioned air   

they smell the sea, a shadow-haunted hole to hide in   

till all this blows over.

                                     When it’s time,

we turn the music up to nerve us

to it, then take them one by one and drop   

in the salty roil and scald, then clamp

the big lid back. Grasping the shapely fantail,   

I plunge mine in headfirst and feel   

before I can detach myself the flat slap   

of a jackknifed back, glimpse for an instant   

before I put the lid on it

the rigid backward bow-bend of the whole body

as the brain explodes and lidless eyes   

sear white. We two are bound in silence   

till the pot-lid planks back and music

floods again, like a tide. Minutes later,

the four of us bend to brittle pink intricate   

shells, drawing white sweet flesh

with our fingers, sewing our shroud-talk

tight about us. Later, near moonless midnight,   

when I scrape the leafbright broken remains   

into the garbage can outside, that last   

knowing spasm eels up my arm again   

and off, like a flash, across the rueful stars.

Eamon Grennan