—for E. R. Shaffer

When you take my wrist, the string of my tongue is loosed
already above your wine-dark skin,

but you tell me your time has not yet come;
the physician will not give me meat. It is Friday,

and I laugh at the mermaid tattoo on your thigh, ask
if I might have fish. I am hungry and can bear no more

to be sent away without bread or scrip, but want
only to be gathered to you before either

of our heads can be served to another. Life is short.
The sea is close and storming. Between my teeth,

your thigh rolls slick and salted as the rocks
on the Pacific coast where I sat before you called me.

It was so cold there, but you are in raptures, asking
why it is so hot to have to hold back.

Again, I edge toward the wine-dark sea,
but you pull me up by numbered hairs, gasping.

Behind the mermaid, I can see them all: the thronging,
famished crowds; Jesus, breaking loaves;

Peter, full-bellied and wide-eyed
as he beholds the Christ; clever Thomas,

lean as his stylus, not a crumb in his beard but gorging
on every word; and John—beautiful John—

with his eyes on every slip of his master’s robes,
every flash of dusk-kissed shoulder

revealed at the lifting of a fish, realizing
he will never be whole without this hunger again.