Fish Out of Water

March 9 2015

A winter fish,

ripped from the lake

and tossed aside.

Where it flops

on the hard white surface,

thrashes, slaps, skirls

across the ice.

Shocked

from the constancy

of its underwater home

by the cold astringent thinness

of this parallel world.

By the sensation of weight

never faced

in instinct’s millions of years.

Paper-thin, velvet-red

its gills frantically flare,

grasping for purchase

in insubstantial air.

A glassy eye

staring sideways

from its flat round socket,

rendered sightless

by unrefracted light,

the brightness

of alien sun.

Death by freezing

is a mercy, in winter

sitting by the open hole,

which is black, and still, and bottomless

in the brilliant expanse of ice.

Because in summer’s merciless sun

it’s a battered oar, skull crushed,

in bilge, swimming with butts

that stinks of gutted fish.

Crude, but quick;

the spongy give

of its fine-boned head.

We are cruel

to inanimate fish,

who have no inner life

and, by rights, are ours.

Who quicksilver slip

with slime,

unnerve us with their staring eyes

side-to-side

behind.

Who bleed as bright as us

but cold.

A fish out of water

must end its life gobsmacked

gasping in air.

As if from one breath to the next

we were flung from mother earth

into the black void of space;

eyes bulging, blood boiling

our silent screams unheard.

I was reading a critique of a new TV show, described in terms something like your "run-of-the-mill fish-out-water cop show". The idea of using the cliché literally, and not as metaphor, appealed to me. So here is another animal-themed piece to go along with all the other fish poems, not to mention my menagerie of deer, dogs, foxes, hawks, elephants, wolves, horses, flies, spiders, dragonflies, mosquitoes, honeybees, ducks, and geese (among all the others I’ve surely written, but don’t recall).

I'm a hypocrite. I eat meat and fish (not much of the former, a lot of the latter), but hate hunting. Even the cruelty of fishing disturbs me, notwithstanding how hard it is to feel empathy for cold-blooded and glassy-eyed fish. Ironically, I live on a lake that's very popular with fishermen, all year round.

The idea that a lobster can be boiled alive and feel nothing is preposterous. Fish may not have rich inner lives; but they certainly do feel pain and fear. They must, because pain and fear are essential to survival, and so it's hardly an anthropomorphic fallacy to imagine that all vertebrate life shares these fundamental neurological functions.

I like alien sun. Imagine living your entire life in the cool dark lake, only to be rudely plucked into a diametrically different dimension: the shock of a parallel universe that existed all along, just beyond the ceiling of the air/water interface. And by rights, are ours returns to an old theme for me: man's presumption that the earth is at his pleasure, there for the taking; the conceit of man's dominion, conferred by God.

Anyway, any time I can shoehorn gobsmacked into a poem, it's well worthwhile!