Apprenticeship

 

 

Dusk on the water, the job was to watch,

unracked, the wet still-dripping creels being tipped

into the grading tray, alive with life.

 

Our seas provided black-eyed velvet crabs

with small horns ridging their top plates. The work:

to grade by size, Those big as a fist, they pointed – 

 

Big as a heart, I saw – were lifted out

as worth a better price. Hours, you would weigh

by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,

 

young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones;

arbiter at the filling, refilling box.

The night progressing until the shed light 

 

drew out thick moths. To work was to find yourself 

drawn in – or was it drawn back – to something

careful and mysterious, hard-shelled and resistant. 

 

Big as a fist or heart. The same rain falls

on that shed and on this house. I did it five years,

and then did it for the rest of my life.

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A poem from the new collection The Island in the Sound. Previously published in The Poetry Review.