It Took All My Energy

 written by Tony Wallace (2001)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It took all my energy to want you

and the rest of me to go after you

and then one day I knew

that I had you.

I was standing at the sink rinsing dust

from a bunch of grapes.

All my energy had been spent

pursuing you and then I had you

and then

I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the grapes.

The day was hot, that day

when I knew I had you. The man

in the house across the street

was cursing his wife.

An hour later I went to see about a job,

and the woman behind the desk

with her gold spectacles

caused me to remember that I had you.

Outside the sky was blue as a china plate.

There is nothing to do

on a day like that

but go to the beach. I caught three fish,

black and heavy as paperweights.

After the third I stopped to clean them in the ribboning surf,

three black fish flecked gold as the capes

of Egyptian kings,

strong swimmers, broad across the backs.

I slit the bellies, tossed the guts and roe

to the waiting gulls, cut the heads off slant

and lay them one by one on the gurgling sand

while I thought of you. Three small boys

picked them up

and carried them away,

holding them aloft as if on pikes.

Even as I fry these fish I think of

their heads against the sky

while the birds worked on a patch of sea

on the lee side of a sand bar that split the water

like the broken spine of a ship,

and as I turn these fish in the pan

I think of the day when I knew I had you,

and then the next, and then the day after that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  

taken from Poetry 180