Fish Heads
after Raymond Carver
Ted Fish made heads out of clay.
He was known for it, loved.
These heads are all over Salida.
Pinch lipped busts in shop windows.
Bobbing ornaments in dead trees.
One, a skinless, meat-red monolith
sits on a bank among boulders,
casting the line of its low gaze
over the Arkansas, a marker
for boaters to measure depth.
I never knew him except through
others’ grief. He died a few
weeks before I moved there.
On the table. Under the knife.
His heart.
Two heads came into my hands
in round about ways. One
from a new friend, fellow artist
and co-worker, Ben, whose
eyes teared up when he handed
it to me, a porcelain, grimacing,
two-faced thing with a hole
clear through the crown to
the throat, passage for some jute
rope I’ve planned for years to string
with fat, glass beads the color
of Caribbean swells. Maybe
I’ll finally get to it. After a story,
Barbara, poet who refuses
public farewells and left his funeral
early, gave me the other: a black face—
blue edged, sort of grinning—emerging
from white porcelain slab. The whole
thing attached to a small black canvas
with two long copper wire stitches.
I placed it on the piano where sheet
music should perch. The piano
is always out of tune, but my son
plays it anyway. Two nights ago,
on a stop as he was driving through,
the tiny head rang, watery
with my son’s invented song.
When I hugged him hello
and later goodbye, hard, I felt him
tremble, quaking in the core, a dark
face pressing through his body
into mine. In the kitchen, he talked
in low, steady tones, like there
was earth under his feet, said
when he gets back he’s drying out,
going to stop filling the hole
with every dead sailor in the sea.
“You can do it,” I said, “change karma,
consequence.” Which was too much,
another hole. You can do it is all I meant,
but saying less is hard for me. He knows.
“Thank you,” he said, and for a second,
soft eyed, lost himself among crumbs
on the counter. Then raised his head.
