look at your open palm and imagine
a tule perch
she's no bigger than that    born
in a June water smelling of crayfish
mayfly larvae, the promise of heat,
like me,
she had all her eggs at birth--tiny pin dots
of molecular design    but imagine
this--after mating, she stores the sperm for six months
until, in the chill quickening of early spring, perhaps
on a Saturday night,
some gate opens in her center; she joins
eggs to sperm and then--amazing thing--
fish begin to form
fins thin as tissue lace with folds
of perch womb    she is a ball, a weighted bobber
imagine forty live fish in your belly--wiggles,
shivering gilles, fins and tails flicking--
she hides in brush, a fallen tree, a tangle
of spring weeds, feels the current--a massage
along her grotesque sides--
waits for the incubating waters of June, some singing
of crickets, a certain fullness of moon,
an unfolding on the earth's sure
rotation