My Father the Shark

When you draw the Atlantic over your red shoulders
                like a comforter and submerge ten yards away,

I don’t know where I’ll see you next. I’ve checked
             the sides of your neck for gills but grazed only stubble—

your lungs are strong as aquifers even after enough
             Marlboros to buy the red bike dusting in our shed.

I pull in my knees, suspended in a cheerleader tuck jump
              to hide snack legs from the sharks in my glossy books:

black-tip and nurse, ragged jaw sand and low-headed bull,
              tigers, even, and whites from deep water cruising

sleepless for schools of dolphin and tuna, their teeth
             winking on the pages I flipped in the museum shop

under the school-bus skeleton of megalodon hanging,
               the one that breathed after I stared at the wheel

of black and white spirals on the second floor and I
             can feel that thick-bone fish below me as you open

your eyes to the sting, to search the shape of my thighs
               from a haze of silt. You stay covered for sixty breaths

while I watch the wind-hustled surface, waiting
              for the taps of your hands like the brushes

of minnows rolled in current and now that ancient beast
              clamps my waist, first jerks me down with a snort

of seawater and holds me there kicking and sightless, my ribs
              beating out and in like pectoral fins the moment

before crunch and swallow and as I flutter with this panic
               of prey, you lift me whole, curled as a hermit shell

plucked from bed and writhing as though wakened
              from a sleep fast and dark as primordial undertow.