Sea To The Thieves

Every Thursday

       Knuckle Nero transports 

Blue Island crabs from 

the flu hive. Smuggles them

lifted still from the crate

off the docks, where fishing crews

stack them after a few days

     at sea. On that island

everyone has a cold. Something

about the cold sea-spray, the

acidic rot brine of gull shit,

ruins respiratory systems

     at the rate of

Agent Orange or straight ammonia. 

Locals live and hospitalize and die

by coughing fits. Everyone 

  except

these fisherman, who are out

at sea for days at a time--

so whatever's toxic about the air

         at Blue Island

they get some regular relief from. 

Though they come home 

to the faces of wives and children,

blue from nautical emphysema. 

The life expectancy of a 

      fisherman's wife is 

thirty-six. But a first mate or

crew man, if he doesn't 

die at sea,

could make sixty with nothing to

slow him down but loneliness:

when he retires, there's no one

at home to keep him bored. 

The thieves who troll the docks

live well into their eighties-- 

further proof 

irony is good for your health. 

They're on the island only long enough

to steal a few crates, smuggle them

in an ice truck or under a tarp

to the mainland, where people 

breathe with the full capacity of the sun. 

Since they make their money there,

they're mainlanders. And twice a week

apply a faint blue tint of makeup

         to their hands and faces

and double as crabbers and dock men. 

Among them, Knuckle Nero is the biggest earner,

John Prince the most skilled thief, 

Myron Grotto the most convincing fisherman. 

They've lived long enough to filch

               three generations. 

Crabs a dull blue, piled high as 

        purgatory, each crawling

over the others like a horny blind man. 

Knuckle and John have moved enough of them

to have developed a kind of philosophy about them. 

Myron, who plays a fisherman well enough

to think like one, looks at a crab 

         and holds it with 

no opinions. "That island is one big 

trap," Knuckle says, and John picks his teeth. 

"A trap the ocean put out there on the land. 

What it catches it eventually takes back. 

Its prey takes bait, and makes a buck off it--

what folks outside that trap call 'a living'."

                                    John nods

while Myron applies a little more face paint. 

"And then we come by--nab the bait

and expand the trap--feed the reach of the sea."

"Could say we're agents of the sea," John adds.

"Could at that," says Knuckle. "The real

fisherman," Myron says, blueing the

bridge of his nose, moral

          as a ghost. "Working men

bringing sea to the thieves."