He swings the shark into the air above his head, hands
     wrapped around its tail,
swinging hard backwards and then overhead, until
     at the very peak of the
arc there is a millisecond of stillness, backlit by the glare
     of city lights, man and shark
a dark silhouette edged with glow, the man’s back a curve

against the weight, and the long shark body an answering
     curve in the air above, like a
pair of sweeping wings, as if both plan, at any moment,
     to take flight together
until the frozen moment breaks as the arc comes down hard
     against the planks with shark and
wood meeting in a solid thud amid the gasps of the crowd,

and the now limp shark again rises in the air above the man
     as he pivots and releases its body
back out to the ocean, and we all rush to the rails, watching
     the creature floating still in a
shining pool cast by the pier’s tall lights, motionless, until
    with a full body jerk, it swims away,
heading to the ocean’s deep waters, away from land, away

from us, away from him, and chaos erupts on the pier’s wide
     planks, voices relieved and amazed –
did you see the size of that thing? – as though that could
     have been missed by any of us.
and you and I meet eyes, thinking of all those we’d swum
      away from, and those we’d stunned
against something hard, and then released to a dark place

to swim on their own, and wordless we reel in our lines,
    pack our things, and head down the pier,
walking suspended above the ocean, through alternate pools
    of light and stretches of dark, past the
voices and crowds gathered around the man, moving towards
    the glare of the city, crossing the final
seaward planks to solid land, and headed home.

– Judith McKenzie

Author’s Note: Several years back, my husband worked swing shifts, and, when he got home, we would go for night fishing at the Santa Monica Pier. In those days, the late-night crowd was quite diverse – raggedy misfits, retired people, night owls – and it was one place that, as an inter-racial couple, we felt fully welcomed. This incident happened one of the last nights we were able to go there before leaving California, and the image and the impact never left us; I particularly found it healing when my husband passed at 48 from an incurable disease, released to sail the seas he loved, much like the shark.