This lovely poem recalls a delightful experience with a fish.  It was written by my friend Jan Frazier.

Little yellow fish,
     you swim somewhere
          in the turquoise Caribbean

that laps the reefs of St. John.
     You slice ripply shafts of sun,
          mouthing algae from the chalky ridges

of a brain coral.
     Or maybe by now
          you are in the belly of  red snapper.

But once
     you were in my hands,
          two cups of flesh

pooling your small finned body.
     What am I
          to make of the way

you stayed still,
     let me stroke you?
          You let yourself be

in the shadow
     of my bobbing body,
          beneath my chest, within hands

held loosely
     in the posture of prayer.
          I gave you room to slip away,

my fingerbones spread and rounded,
     a leaky bathysphere.
          You stayed.  Each time

I stretched my arms out front like an arrow
     and stroked, pushing water
          to propel my body to shore,

I lowered my chin,
     expecting to find you
          gone, startled, washed away.

You stayed,
     a constant yellow flame
          flickering at my heart.

I want to think
     it was kinship kept you with me
          from the reef a hundred feet out

all the way to the glittering white beach–
     that held you to my leviathan body,
          snorkeled and alien–and not

some inkling that plankton
     mght spill from my mouth.
          At the limit of your world,

I sat in two inches of warm, salty blue,
     ran a finger the length of you
          for goodbye,

and stepped back onto my dry world–
     white, hot sand
          that took the imprint of my foot.

I want to think
     you would remember me
          if I returned to your water,

that you would find me
     again
          as you did that day.

                     

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.