The now of dusk eats time, light the river held
in daytime, now released to your gleaming eyes.

Interspersed with clouds, the moon is a dragon
of quiet moods. You ignore the bluegill pile on

the stringer, scales that shimmer, wave crests
mid-jig arrested, fixed in the eyes’ dead glaze.

Constellations soften; emerging simile speaks
of reproduction: like unto like, stream to river,

river to ocean, swordfish to armor that alights
the spinner of your eye, reflects, or deflects,

everywhere the same: pale flashes, ghost faces,
any once-living thing, ashes. Yet you believe

in the simultaneity of lives, that sun and moon
are companions in eternity, that fish and ghosts

and we are one: we eat, digest, grow, absorbed
by mounds of earth that tolerate our presence,

show in scales the brevity of faces, shine in lures
the same lithe desires you now lid. It’s dark

at the bottom of the steel bucket. Lips move,
mouthing what a tadpole circles. You cast a line

out into the open sky, hopeful for a miracle.

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism
Neuronics.