Black Moon

I watch him drag the boat across
….the scree, over the dry doggerel
……of mackerel scales and filament

of a season ended, to the water.
….The sand flays the last flakes
……of paint from the boat’s hull,

splash and crack at the confluence
….of stone and water, and he is out
……beyond the waves, where fishbones

glint like small suns in a black mirror,
….and the splay of the Pelican’s wing
……stitches the sea to the sky. Brine-

bleached hands haul the sodden creel
….above the gunwales, and there again
……is the gaping child-shaped hole,

sawn by the snapping-turtle’s teeth,
….ragged-cut and impossible to mend.
……Did I say that the turtle is guided

by ambient moonlight? So, the wolf
….howls. The waves gnaw at the shore.
……Bones and light are mixed with water.

*Alex Grant is a native Scot now living in N.C. His Randall Jarrell Prize-winning chapbook, Chains & Mirrors, has just been published by Harperprints. He was the 2004 winner of WMSU’s Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship and the 2006 winner of the Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, and has been a recent finalist or runner-up for The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Book Prizes, Discovery/The Nation, The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize and The Writers at Work Fellowship. His chapbook, Fear of Moving Water, was a finalist for the 2006 Sunken Garden Poetry Contest, and he was nominated for Meridian’s Best New Poets anthology in 2005 and 2006. His work has recently appeared or is upcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Sycamore Review, Nimrod and Cimarron Review, among others. He works up and down the eastern seaboard for a not-for-profit healthcare organization, whose address you can read by the moon, and divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he indulges his Celtic fondness for excess. Click here to e-mail Alex (sandersgrant@yahoo.com).