Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Thread So Fine
Just Below The Surface
by Jane Hirshfield
Just below the surface, fish, still
In the late afternoon, the sunlight ladders down,
breaking across their bodies' narrow poise.
It is almost a music, the brown unmoving quickness
intersected with gold.
They are, even in sleep, wholly alive and one, a necklace
assembled on thread so fine it is almost surmise.
A first moves, another, and they are gone.
As one lover goes, and, long after, the other;
yet somehow, in another shadow of the same water,
are still there.
by Jane Hirshfield
Just below the surface, fish, still
In the late afternoon, the sunlight ladders down,
breaking across their bodies' narrow poise.
It is almost a music, the brown unmoving quickness
intersected with gold.
They are, even in sleep, wholly alive and one, a necklace
assembled on thread so fine it is almost surmise.
A first moves, another, and they are gone.
As one lover goes, and, long after, the other;
yet somehow, in another shadow of the same water,
are still there.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Opening Up on the McCloud
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Time for another poem about fish
The Fish
Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fishand held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Fish Forward
Thursday, April 2, 2009
As I Walked Out One Evening |
by W. H. Auden |
As I walked out one evening, |
Trout thoughts
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