Glass

Relaxing with a morning
Promenade along the quay
Of Puerto Las Olivas
I stop
To watch, across fishscale waters
A listing, heeling tug
Of war between two gulls.
I do not recognise the fish
Wet and shining, it might be
Dace, red grouper, lookdown
Shanny, brittlestar, bream
Sterlet, flounder or snipefish.
It rips
And chunks rain
Onto the deck of a smack.
He comes out of nowhere
Careless bicicletta pilot
With a comet's tail of blond hair
Pulls a skid like Jesus
Christ into a stack of whicker creels
Heaped with blubbery brackish pulpo.
They landslide him and in a welter
Of ripe curses
I step back.

I do not see
The moorings
Snag my heel in a coarse coil
Of netting and upended
Back bent like a salmon's
I plunge unseen
Into the cool jewelled water.
Their yells smother the splash
Bubbles rise and break
The surface in pearly clusters.
I hear the ruckus
As if through wintered glass.