Within His Lifetime

Behind a closed, anonymous door
in a grand hotel on Park Avenue,
a slender woman in a sleeveless black dress
sits at a table set with silver flatware.
She fingers a necklace of pearls at her throat.

Her white-haired husband sits opposite her
with beautiful posture. An investment banker, patron of the opera,
he's unaccustomed to waiting but
he waits in the quiet room for his dinner.

New York streets are also quiet
since nowadays automobiles pilot themselves,
and they only run on solar power.
Only rich people eat fish. But they have to be willing
to pay for contraband, for salmon
poached in the dead of night by nameless figures,
then poached in court bouillon, gently so that
the surface of the liquid is not broken by bubbles:
a nearly dead art,
like stained-glass making and stonecutting for cathedrals.
They had said it could happen within his lifetime.

The banker's granddaughter doubts any marlin
ever broke through the surface of the ocean, the water
streaming off its cobalt flanks
as it vaulted into the rarified air,
since marlin are only unicorns with fins.

Men still give roses in the first blush of love
but the grandson doesn't brace himself
against a wet gunwale, trying to decide
if the tug on his line is imagined, nor pulls
a freshly minted silver thing
out of a balsam-scented lake, discovering
it's as real as a slap in the face, his first hooked fish.

But now the banker is indeed sitting
in front of his salmon. He remembers snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez
among schools of fishes in audacious colors.
He has lived too long. He finds the first, expensive forkful
won't move down his clamping throat
since now he's trying the only one
of Baroness Blixen's salt-water cures
left to him; she wrote that tears
or sweat or the complex sea cure anything.
The fish used to scatter when he reached out to touch them
as if his fingers were electrified.