He’d cut a sea worm on the weathered dock and
weave the silver hook through its body
without getting bit once. His
small children watched as he flicked
the biting head away to splat on high tide,
lower that khaki green line with a lead sinker
to thud at bottom,
jerk it up a foot and tie it off the cleat. And
they waited a night
til after breakfast he’d bring a
toad fish up, gasping
spines like a dinosaur flexing, even half alive
worth two dollars to the science men
down in Woods Hole,
or an eel winding live ‘round the line,
hard to kill, that eel he’d try to cook,
but first had to hang in the dank cellar
by its head from timber posts,
dripping onto the wet dark dirt
then had a job to slice the skin and
peel it with pliers, tough
as a treaded tire. They remember
fifty years later
that eel cut up and mostly
skinned, still jumping in the cast iron
pan.
— By Mira Coleman
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