4
Three Poems by Stephen Elves
A Display of Smoked Mackerel
After Mark Doty
Splendid in rows like the silvery dead
your afterlife now lit in amber
as if each caught fire then dived
into waves of crushed ice.
Your summer skin glows oiled bronze
a tiger-burnt patina of experience:
the shimmer of youthful flash
quietened by an old gold currency;
this is the whole fish, no etiolated fillet
slit from a bodybag –
the meat needs strong company
in a sweet glisten of horseradish.
The biggest fish catches my eye:
its white stare from a hollow socket
half-winks at me to unwrap its silk
chevrons, strip it to the nub.
I want its dark flesh: its eye,
drowning in dry air, wants mine.