<\/p>\n

King Opah<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

King Opah, Moonfish, Lampris Regius, <\/em>I hope your life,<\/p>\n

Before drifting solo up some immense Pacific seamount<\/p>\n

In search of squid or other of your own nourishment you<\/p>\n

Were hooked by a curious entrepreneurial longline,<\/p>\n

Was as good as the dark, dense orange steak<\/p>\n

The expert butcher cut from behind your head<\/p>\n

Suggested it must have been, that your silver flanks,<\/p>\n

That your steely, dark blue dorsal skin or scales<\/p>\n

Sporting irregular rows of big white spots<\/p>\n

And your orange or crimson fins all navigated<\/p>\n

Midnights of fantastic bathypelagic spawning,<\/p>\n

That your large eyes circled with gold, vermilion jaw line,<\/p>\n

And the thick, rich oily fat beneath your 200-pound iridescence<\/p>\n

Quivered with sweet salt as you conducted your pectoral fins<\/p>\n

Through oceanodromous wanderings so rarely seen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harmless to us as squid were harmless to you, you took the bait<\/p>\n

The way we take the bait of living,<\/p>\n

A few hours before I seared two pounds of you at dusk,<\/p>\n

Working carefully above a small, glowing pyramid of charcoal<\/p>\n

As breakers murmured in the sandy distance<\/p>\n

And breezes rustled the palms above your vanishing.<\/p>\n

Through you, with you came your life and other life and more than life,<\/p>\n

Reality and your unsheathing from it<\/p>\n

Into a greater wilderness all held on the palate for a moment,<\/p>\n

Lingering for an hour the way words linger.<\/p>\n

Unmarked by any stone, forgotten unless I make these words<\/p>\n

As strong as stone and then eventually forgotten anyways<\/p>\n

In the way everything will be forgotten, even stones,<\/p>\n

O Opah that I nonetheless remember,<\/p>\n

You haunt me with the possibility of joy,<\/p>\n

No, the reality of vitality, and I thank you,<\/p>\n

I thanked you then and thank you now,<\/p>\n

Loving if not worshipping everything<\/p>\n

You were then and now are not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

O Opah, deep, quiet, darker than midnight, secret,<\/p>\n

Illuminated, open, succulent, destroyed in joy by art,<\/p>\n

Now merely a ghost or part of memory, listen:<\/p>\n

The embers down the beach were flickering back at the stars,<\/p>\n

And off in the distance a small group of us was laughing<\/p>\n

And talking and praising bread and wine and you,<\/p>\n

And enjoying the ocean whispers and each other and the night.<\/p>\n

It seemed to go on forever, as a diamond might,<\/p>\n

But warm, a loving, mortal crystal, flickering, flickering.<\/p>\n

Opah, O King Opah, thank you, thank you, thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  King Opah   King Opah, Moonfish, Lampris Regius, I hope your life, Before drifting solo up some immense Pacific seamount In search of squid or other of your own nourishment you Were hooked by a curious entrepreneurial longline, Was as good as the dark, dense orange steak The expert butcher cut from behind your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3342,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341\/revisions\/3342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}