Night Crabbing

Touching, we say, when something’s

close, less weighty, lying in bed, telling

again our summers spent watching

Mother as she showed us how to hold

blue claws by the lower appendages

and stroke their bellies calmly

working their bodies into a trance.

Sleeping, she called it, though

Above a black pot, it was small

mercy, arousal from a child’s finger

coaxing them limp, drifting, as if

in our hands it dreamt of water.