for Karen Shepard
I was once a disturbance
and the world the water—
sometime pond, often ocean—
and that morning nobody was biting
on the question of Bishop's fish,
her words hung on the line, slack,
terrible, tremendous, silent sea
of existence, how could my professor—
hardly thirty, black bob cut—not go under?
After class, I bounded back to her office
to apologize for them, for us,
why didn't we speak,
me, who did not yet have a voice,
while she composed emails
with currents of ease.
Finally, I saw my own eye,
only years later: I was that fish
on the line, waiting for a rainbow.