August 28, 2004

• Saturday Poem I Admire

  THE FISH

  I caught a tremendous fish
  and held him beside the boat
  half out of water, with my hook
  fast in a corner of his 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.
  

  ---

  Written by Elizabeth Bishop in 1940 when she was 29. She lived to be 68 and wrote only about 100 published poems in her life, but they were choice. I’ve loved this particular poem for years. Very Joycean. Makes me proud to be a survivor. Kind of wish it would have been written by a man so no one could say it was just a woman’s tenderness. Sorry all you fishermen, and yes I still eat fish.
  Deep Thought: As the evening sun faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.
  Today I am grateful for: Fish oil capsules
  End of Day – 8:47 pm
  + = Got to buy school supplies for my two grandchildren today. I loved doing that and seeing them leave with their new backpacks full of stuff at the end of the day.
  - = Kerry’s electoral vote lead has shrunk from 307-231 a few weeks ago to 270-259 now. Click here Hope there are mega protests this week at the convention. Boy isn’t that going to be interesting.

  • 10:58 am
  • 6 Comments