Two Poems
Dan Schall
Sestina for the Hylian Loach
When to the shore I first hauled
you, hoisted by the dark
matter of your gills, I didn’t know
what era you came from. Still,
I watched time stretch
down the length of your body.
The fishing hole man gawks: Nobody
he says, I mean nobody hauls
these suckers in anymore. He stretches
over the counter, strokes the dark
circles, scales patterning your flesh. You still
shimmer, squirming in sun, as if you know
his voice, warped at the pond bottom, know
how he rants of your rarity to anybody
who rents a reel, as if he didn’t still
the waters that fed you, didn’t haul
mounds of his sand to your basin mouth, didn’t darken
your waters in this stretch
of smoky forest, didn’t stretch
fake logs across the unknown
byways of your dark
migrations, didn’t build this body
up around you, didn’t haul
lumber from the forest, still
green, to frame this silt-stilled
pond, little circle of a hut, didn’t stretch
to nail birch decking above the door, at last, hauling
his shop junk from his last lake. Know
that I see you, the pulsing bodies
of your barbels, relict under this yellow-dark
moon, and also here, your eyes dark
from the fishing hole man’s fingernails, still
wedged in your gill. It needs a large body
of water, you barely hear him say. Used to stretch
from Zora’s River down to the lake. But now
it’s endangered. I know you hauled
this girl yourself (and in the dark!), but let’s not stretch
how long it’s out of water. Still, I’d love to know
your secret. You’re really somebody. Hall of Fame.
Eclipse (Special Stage)
Glasses donned hours early,
posed by his fun-sized lawn chair,
my nephew is recording his first
excused absence from kindergarten
so that he might witness sun and moon
portaling themselves into a giant ring.
While he waits, he regales me
with a new zone in Sonic the Hedgehog, one
he just invented, two minutes ago:
Juice Zone. An ocean of juice
very much like tides swelling and
draining in the labyrinthine level
where, in real life, he’s actually
stuck. But there’s a trick, he says,
laughing through mirrored eyes.
You breathe through straws, straws
that stick up above the juice!
I think of a snorkel, a ring
curving, repeating itself
until it finds a surface. Air.
Thirty years ago, the last time
the paths of these bodies were fated
to darken Pennsylvania, my father,
breath boozed like roadkill,
forced me, shivering in silence, on the stairs.
Locked out of his girlfriend’s house
at 3 a.m., knuckles swollen from tooling,
failing to hook and pick his way back
inside. Days later,
before the big moment, my mother
pressed all her blind fears into me
with a single warning:
Don’t look at the sun.
I remember my own crying,
hurling the controller with rage:
Sonic, the world’s fastest creature,
but only on land. He could barely swim.
How to climb those labyrinth stairs
before they flooded? How to stop him
from drowning? Let us swirl,
leap through the spinning threshold
to the special stages, gather each emerald of chaos,
bend spacetime so that moon and sun
and water and child and ring might all
submit themselves to breath.
The first quill of sun
snapping free from the moon’s grip
and my nephew has moved on
to his next new world: Jelly Zone.
A land of molten crystal mush,
geysering from marbled ground
like cosmic flares. But jelly.
One day, he says, I want to build
my own Sonic games.
I tell him, you can do anything,
and mean it. But I study his smile
amazed at how he does it,
still searching for the right trick.