Black Light

1.

Advent in a small town: this or that homily,
a flat mist rising from the autumn slough.

Uncle Karl names black-winged gulls, angles
catfish with Delta clams, counting sturgeon

and striped bass—a fisherman’s nominalism:
harriers and needlegrass, and, come spring,
brass buttons blooming in the narrows.

Today, there is a low wind off the estuary.

2.

Aunt Elle bends over a kettle of chowder
mincing clams into hot broth.

Last summer, she planted primroses.
They grew into a wild flounce behind
the old willow.

She washed out jelly jars to collect
the flowers: primrose pinks for Uncle,
coming home off the summer slough,
home from the brass buttons
and the needlegrass.

3.

Advent surprises itself above the dark
tannin of the cold slough.

Uncle is a shadow now in someone else’s
boat. The estuary wind shudders what’s left
of Aunt Elle’s primroses,

the years, lightheaded, spinning down into
the brackish water in the tule shallows, solstice
after unrecovered solstice shifting in the dark
beneath the needlegrass.