Scales              He wonders why his breath on her white neck should seem such a patronizing gesture? Is he one of those usual depressives you see stretched to the point that they can only perform a rather windblown succession of controlled self-images? Or is he a living volunteer to the cause of life, blessed with ladylike hands and a hunger comfortable yet insistent as all hunger should be?          Still,  the woman— a crinoline Mother Goose figure (or was that him?) leans against the sweating glass of the shark tank and begins to squirm away from his mouth (admittedly a mouth that was always poorly lit), holding her own hands’ undulant silhouettes up to the water light (black dorsals of some mystery flounder). They threaten to detach from her wrists,  to multiply beyond their posted capacity, to bring the whole damp scene cranking down in indecipherable blue and black washes upon white tiles centered with embedded splinters of pink coral and sand dollars.          In the pupil of his eye a doll reflection of her hovered in the dank room, her hands invisible behind her head which is a red stream commencing from a cold underground lake.           He had always been the classical Father, through lacking children,  and his face was one of those “assumed” products which no one considers consciously and which was far too smooth to cling to the mind’s underbelly. The woman’s electric flutter of a face was an inquisition to him,  an insulation, a too-solid adaptation of the Struggle as social law.  Surely, here in the black and blue fishroom, he would prefer to pull away slowly from these waters, leaving his hands (almost ladylike) behind for hours after the rest of him had fled to some plain American soil.          And is she knew she might be the last (or just another) safe harbor for the noble and lonely blue whale, and if she owned an excitement bubbling toward an alert atmosphere— she still dreamt of being drowned.          She found him devious in the depths and disliked his ambivalent hands, almost ladylike with their flakes of dry white skin, like scales.