October 11: "The Fish," Elizabeth Bishop, Beatrice

One of my favorite poems of all time is Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."  I remember the first time I read it when I was in middle school, I think.  It blew me away.  I had no idea that you could write poems about catching a fish on a lake.

Bishop paints the scene so vividly that you can almost smell the marshy water and see the fish gilling the air in her boat.  And I love the moment, near the end of the poem, where the speaker and the fish stare into each other's eyes before she lets him go.

Billy Collins sort of conjures up Elizabeth Bishop in today's poem . . . 

The Fish

by: Billy Collins

As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.

I haven't done much fishing in my life, and I can't remember the last time I held a fishing pole in my hands.  It was never one of my favorite things--standing at the edge of a lake or river, waiting for something scaled to bite my hook.  I'm not saying I hated the experience.  It just wasn't for me.

But then again, a lot of people wouldn't think typing a blog post or scribbling in a journal is fun.  I do.  Stringing words together on a page relaxes me and allows me to feel a little in control of my life.  (This may be a false sense of security, but it works for me.  It relaxes me.)

It's Friday night.  I had dinner with both my kids this evening.  We ate pizza and played some video games.  When I got home, I took my puppy for a long walk.  I just stepped outside to check out the aurora situation.  Didn't see much except stars and the moon.  The air smelled like autumn--leaf mold and coming frost.

I could write a poem about tonight, like Bishop wrote about catching the fish or Collins about eating fish in Pittsburgh.  Mine would be about a three-meat pizza and Trivial Pursuit, my kids loving on each other through insult, and my wife, my beautiful wife of almost 29 years, on the couch beside me, drowning happily in family.  Then the stars appear, like they do for Dante at the end of the Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso, always shining with holy hope.

Saint Marty give thanks for the Beatrice of his life.