Dennis Caswell

Container

Buckets are boats
in reverse, but
water won’t care,
cupped or pressed,
flowing or flaking
or freezing or
torn to a roaring
plunge of angels,
flying from cliff-tops,
their million bellies
fat and white.

Merman

Sunlight makes hula hands over my sandy floor.
Fish glide by through the thickened sky,
floating like fruit in Jell-O. What do they do
when they itch? Ten cool tons are over my head,
the surface in peaks, like frosting, and when
a lonely sailor girl, elbows perched on a taffrail,
catches a flash of me, darting beneath
the amnion of my sea home, she’ll only see
a story she already knows. She won’t ever
see me again, but she’ll die believing
in what she did see, which was not me.

Next Poem