The Ghost Knife

(A type of loach often found in aquariums)

You swim back and forth before settling on white gravel.

Almost blind by day, you remember a rock face and the scent of shrimp,
and in each ripple of fin, feel a body memory of release.

Whatever floats above the green, pre-dawn light is moving its mouth
as if saying your name over and over again till it blurs like the wings

of a moth hovering against glass. It’s like something you could
almost see through, something to believe in, like God.

In each eclipse you sense a movement, a shimmer, perhaps,
a presence appearing in a real world you can only know by dying.

So, you swim back and forth, your eye ghosting these ambiguities
of sight in a world of light and reflection that collapses

into the familiar myth of your making.

First Published in The Orchards Poetry Journal (November 2018)
Forthcoming in The Lost Books of the Bestiary (V Press LC, 2021)