Sophie’s second grade is studying the ocean, and to this end they did fish stencils: take a real fish (dead), paint it, and use it as a stencil Cool, eh? One does not eat these fish afterwards, but we eat unpainted fish all the time. A tip: save the tail for use in mermaid drawings.
THE UNEMPLOYED FISHERMAN’S ALMANAC
For fifty years he sat
in a tin and newspaper shack
writing his memoirs
on the backs of cereal boxes
and flattened flour sacks
and sugar bags and wallpaper
while the snow stacked
into new sky lines
and the dogs slept quietly
under their snow pavilions.
Every year the wind
flattened his hut lower.
Termites ate the wood away;
the salt bit into the aluminum.
When his only roof
was an old wool cap
he sat under a star-lit lamp
packing his universe
into his old bone typewriter.
As the stars collapsed
he filled in the margins
of the universe until every page
was black and then the sky
went black and itself collapsed and
ended his thousand-page almanac.
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