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.
