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Catching Pisces

He peddles alchemized wood 
Along the outdoor corridor,
Milk-crate mounting as students skim by, 
Heeding not his lifelong stock.

Sweat leaks from his palette.
He searches their fingers for the shavings 
That lie flat like loose beard hairs
Around the jaw of his blade, 

And finds none of his genus 
In the campus bowl. The school is dry. 
Gills are clogged. The flounders flounder, 
Breathless, uninspired. 
	
“Support the artist!” 

He ravels his short rod,
Never reeling any fish—koi or koi.
For his hook’s too dull to 
Pierce mouths in pouted apathy.

They request the modish: 
An erect piece of marble, please.
Give us David or broker 
Than you came return to no home.

But he doesn’t solicit stone—
And no statues stand among his bait.
They squirm supine, worms of sylvan make,
Carved in relief with aquatic inlays.

He visions them all a constellation.
As a child, damper in eye, 
Ampler in bosom, he
Dreamt of casting his cord aloft;

To pull twin Pisces 
From their sable lake, then
Strew their scales to torch
The oak in fancy’s forest,

So as the wren’s aubades rouse
Dead and deaf men far,
His line would stretch 
To capture seabed hearts.

Ah, but woe, it was and is not so.
The fish he seeks to net are not alive.
 Merely they mime the living:
Drifting idly, soulless with the undertow.

Alas, 

Still swim the stubborn stars above, and love 
Thus fails the fisher of the dream he chose.
Now nothing but the sweet worms writhe, he knows,
Belly empty, though his bucket brims thereof.

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