October 11: "The Fish," Elizabeth Bishop, Returning to the Sea

Mary Oliver goes fishing . . . 

The Fish

by:  Mary Oliver

The first fish

I ever caught

would not lie down

quiet in the pail

but flailed and sucked

at the burning

amazement of the air

and died

in the slow pouring off

of rainbows.  Later

I opened his body and separated

the flesh from the bones

and ate him.  Now the sea

is in me.  I am the fish, the fish

glitters in me; we are

risen, tangled together, certain to fall

back to the sea.  Out of pain,

and pain, and more pain

we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished

by the mystery.

Poet Oliver does poet Elizabeth Bishop one better.  When Bishop writes about her encounter with a fish, she examines the fish, inventories it, wonders at its age and battle scars, and then she lets it go--releases it back to the rainbow of the waters.  Oliver, on the other hand, watches the fish she catches while it flails in the bucket, sucking the killing oxygen, until it dies in "the slow pouring off / of rainbows."  Rainbows again.  Then, Oliver separates the meat from the bone, and she eats, making the fish flesh of her flesh.  A part of herself.

My daughter and son love to fish.  On the other hand, I'm not a fishing person.  I have gone fishing in my youth--I once caught a 28-inch coho salmon with a redworm.  Don't ask me how.  However, my definition of a good time does not involve bait, hooks, or a reel.  But I do find something sacred in Oliver's description of her fish.  In the eating of it.  The mystery of returning to the sea.

In the past, I have written a poem about a fish.  Of course, I wasn't really writing about a scaled and finned creature.  My fish was mental illness and maternal love.  Mystery and evolution.

Fish can represent different things to different writers.  Just like rain can be cleansing and renewing (think baptism) or annihilating (Noah and the Great Flood).  If I were to write another fish poem tonight, I'm sure that fish wouldn't symbolize mental illness or heredity or a mother's affection.  I'm really tired, so the fish would probably come from deeper waters and deeper currents.  I don't want to know what Freud would say about a big fish in a dream.  Apologies to  Sigmund--sometimes a fish is just a fish. 

Saint Marty just needs to take a deep breath and dive in.

May 12: Coho Salmon, James Scannell McCormick, "Fish"

I have a Michigan poem from my friend Scannnell for tonight.  It's about fishing.

I have never been much of an outdoor sportsperson.  Unlike most native males from the Upper Peninsula, I have only gone deer hunting once in my life.   Didn't shoot anything.  Instead, I sat on a tree stump and ate M&Ms.  However, I used to go fishing quite a bit with my brother when I was a kid.

The largest fish I ever caught was a 28-inch coho salmon, and it was a complete accident.  I was about twelve-years-old, and my brother put a red worm on my hook and told me to cast it into the river while he went back to the truck for some serious tackle and bait.  Seconds later, there was a flash of silver and a tremendous splash.  My line started screaming out from my reel.  I yanked back hard on the rod, setting the hook in the great fish's mouth.  Then I yanked back again.

The salmon came sailing out of the water, landing on the rocks in front of me, where it began smacking and flailing its way back to the water.  I was terrified.  My brother was quickly on the rocks, cornering my prize.  I took it home, got my picture taken with it, and never saw it again.

That's the only really good fishing story Saint Marty has.

Fish

by:  James Scannell McCormick

To the "Michigan Fish Poets"

When I was a little boy I went down to
Big Bay beach, where two older boys, shirtless, were up
To their thighs in water, and they were catching smelt
With their hands, then holding them flat on the concrete
Jetty, where, for fun, they poked out the fishes' eyes
With linden sticks and threw the fish back in again,
And the fish weren't hovering like bullets in gunmetal blue
Stasis, or mouthing prayers, but thick tear-tracks of blood
Followed their pain-curling bodies in the bone-cold water.
Which is why, believe me, I, too, know about fish.