Revised from 2015

An oarfish came 
to the surface
to die, a nightmare-seed
twenty-three feet long.

It entered the shallows
near where
a man was painting an eye of Horus
on each side 

of the bow
of his leaking boat,
hoping to keep it afloat
for just one more season.

He looked down
and saw the oarfish —
frilled, silvery,
taking forever to pass —

thought of luck and fate; looked back
at his boat and saw the new, wet, flat eyes
of his old livelihood; considered
how long he’d been here,

how long
he had worked, how long he’d
fished without ever seeing anything
like this oarfish in a net or on a line.

Lord, he thought,
I am so tired, and my boat is so old;
there is so much left to learn, to see;
so little time left in which to learn.

What the oarfish 
thought of all this
is unknown for by the eye of Horus
and the eye of Ra,

there was no telling
that tale of a life
spent in darkness
and ending in light.

Such a tale would not have
much of us in it; not enough 
of what the gods intended for the oarfish,
but this life could not have simply been

so a poor man would be moved
to change his own life
by watching something
he thought was fantastic die.