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.