Trout Tank, Café Le Sporting

They are there in every weather
in my imagination,
as they were in the mountain town
where I was a student once, 
in a café declared out-of-bounds
because of sex, drinking and dance.

They are nosing the cloudy walls
of the tank with their gaping mouths and flat 
unspeculative eyes. Green and rose
smokes of blood and jealousies limber out
into rainbows, bent from their flanks’ follicles
like eruptions of dumb adolescence,

rust or verdigris blooming on gunmetal’s
unpolished curve. Sometimes, plastered 
with leaves after autumn storms, the tank chills
the air into beads of pure longing 
that run down in hesitant trails
and lose themselves at the bottom;

sometimes the snow is heaped up
in a shrug on the tank in December 
like a hunched coat, set to ignore
small crises of feeling, abrupt
departures and all the numb rituals
that will hardly outlast the New Year;

sometimes, with its hidden source
of light, this world seems to tiger
the temperate faces of those 
who are waiting on the other side
of the glass, where the horse chestnut’s candles
of flower and the twirling panels