Category: Poems

Friday poem: Goldfish are Ordinary

Nothing is ordinary.

Goldfish are Ordinary – Stacie Cassarino

At the pet store on Court Street,
I search for the perfect fish.
The black moor, the blue damsel,
cichlids and neons. Something
to distract your sadness, something
you don’t need to love you back.
Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,
orange, red-capped, pearled body,
the darting translucence? Goldfish
are ordinary, the boy selling fish
says to me. I turn back to the tank,
all of this grace and brilliance,
such simplicity the self could fail
to see. In three months I’ll leave
this city. Today, a chill in the air,
you’re reading Beckett fifty blocks
away, I’m looking at the orphaned
bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor.
Do you want to see aggression?
the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish
to the light while dropping handfuls
of minnows into the bowl. He says,
I know you’re a girl and all
but sometimes it’s good to see.
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.

Friday poem: The Ripple Effect

This prose poem makes my head spin, and makes me think about consequences.

The Ripple Effect – Jamey Dunham

The sleepy shark rolls from bed at the sound of the bell: the fisherman’s foot ringing in the water. On the pier a young girl purchases a dried apricot from a vendor and rolls its wrinkled skin over her tongue before biting down. Behind tightly drawn curtains, the boy who might have grown up to be her great love (or grocer) succumbs to his illness and orphans his parents, as the shark draws behind a curtain of foam. The girl, grown tired of waiting for her father, disappears into the crowded streets of the village as a bell ringing from the marketplace wakes the sleeping fisherman just in time to reel in his apricot. The young boy watching from the pier bites his tongue at the sight of the wrinkled skin. Succumbing to his illness, he runs off to the grocer as if to his lover. The young girl, running late for dinner, stops off at the marketplace on her way home. She purchases a shark from the vendor and leads it home through the crowded streets of the village to meet her parents. The girl is an orphan but it doesn’t matter. There are wedding bells ringing in her ears. They’re in love.

Friday poem: Sharks in the Rivers

How are we to exist in such a hostile world?

Sharks in the Rivers – Ada Limón

We’ll say unbelievable things
to each other in the early morning—

our blue coming up from our roots,
our water rising in our extraordinary limbs.

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.

I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

It is a short walkway—
into another bedroom.

Consider the handle. Consider the key.

I say to a friend, how scared I am of sharks.

How I thought I saw them in the creek
across from my street.

I once watched for them, holding a bundle
of rattlesnake grass in my hand,
shaking like a weak-leaf girl.

She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,

Sharks bite fewer people each year than
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.

Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks.

Through another doorway, I walk to the East River saying,

Sharks are people too.
Sharks are people too.
Sharks are people too.

I write all the things I need on the bottom
of my tennis shoes. I say, Let’s walk together.

The sun behind me is like a fire.
Tiny flames in the river’s ripples.

I say something to God, but he’s not a living thing,
so I say it to the river, I say,

I want to walk through this doorway
But without all those ghosts on the edge,
I want them to stay here.
I want them to go on without me.

I want them to burn in the water.

Friday poem: Upon Shark

Robert Herrick was a 17th century English poet. This poem is not about a literal shark that lives in the sea…

Upon Shark – Robert Herrick

Shark, when he goes to any publick feast,
Eates to ones thinking, of all there, the least.
What saves the master of the House thereby?
When if the servants search, they may descry
In his wide Codpeece, (dinner being done)
Two Napkins cram’d up, and a silver Spoone.

Friday poem: The Shark

The scientific name of the white shark is Carcharadon carcharias. The Carcharadon part comes from a Greek word, Karcharos (in the poem below) which means “sharp”. For a poet who lived from 1836 to 1920, this is a remarkably prescient poem, as in its final line the poet exhorts the shark to “learn of Man, to fight” in order to survive.

The Shark – William Henry Venable

Captured! Along the beach those shouts reveal
The fisherman exultant victor! Hark!
The Karcharos, from out his crystalline, dark
Blue lair by rud of flesh and lurking steel
Bewrayed, hath ravined down with his last meal
Death as a gobbet. On the hot sand, stark,
He gasps and shudders agonizing. Mark!
With horrible grin those bloody jaws appeal
Unto his gloating murderers.—No more
Those serried ranks sextuple of fanged white
Shall scare the shallows and appall the shore,
Never again wreak havoc and affright,
Ranging the Gulf Stream, weltering in gore;—
Poor Shark! Man-eater! learn of Man, to fight.

Friday poem: Tiger Shark

This lovely little poem is the second one by Hailey Leithauser that I have found. It does not portray the tiger shark as cuddly by any stretch of the imagination.

 Tiger Shark – Hailey Leithauser

Fear streamlined to elegance
and elegance made mute
within this skin of gunmetal
and gash mouthed grin. Repute
would have the monster cruel—untrue—
for mannerly cruelty
demands a heart, unwitnessed
in its calm machinery.

Friday poem: The Bluefish

Menhaden are a fish that fill a vital part of the food web in many parts of the world, specially the western Atlantic Ocean. Bluefish (called shad locally) are a popular gamefish (i.e. people fish them for sport – ugh!) and very aggressive hunters of other fish (such as menhaden).

The Bluefish – Isaac McLellan

(Pomatomus saltatrix.)

It is a brave, a royal sport,
Trolling for bluefish o’er the seas;
Fair skies and soaring gulls above,
A steady blowing breeze;
A shapely yacht whose foaming prow
The billowy plain divides,
That like a gallant courser speeds
Far, free o’er ocean tides.

First from West India seas they came,
Haunting the Cuban coast,
Cruel as Spanish buccaneers,
A fierce, rapacious host.
But now by Northern seaboard shores
Their murderous way they take,
From Mexic Gulf to Labrador,
Wherever billows break.
The weaker tenants of the main
Flee from their rage in vain,
The vast menhaden multitudes
They massacre o’er the flood;
With lashing tail, with snapping teeth
They stain the tides with blood.

Rakish are they, like pirate craft,
All matchless to assail,
With graceful, shapely, rounded sides
And the sharp, forked tail;
And when the angler’s hook is fixed
They fight, they struggling bleed,
Now leaping high, now plunging deep,
Darting with lightning speed.

And yet these sea marauders,
These tyrants of the main,
By fiercer, mightier ruffians
Are hunted, conquered, slain;
The tumbling porpoise hunts them,
Dorado fierce pursues,
And when the shark assaileth,
Blood-stains the waves suffuse.

Friday poem: Submarine Mountains

Here’s another poem by Cale Young Rice. It made me think of how albatross can follow the unseen ridges of undersea mountains to find food in the currents there.

Submarine Mountains – Cale Young Rice

Under the sea, which is their sky, they rise
To watery altitudes as vast as those
Of far Himalayan peaks impent in snows
And veils of cloud and sacred deep repose.
Under the sea, their flowing firmament,
More dark than any ray of sun can pierce,
The earthquake thrust them up with mighty tierce
And left them to be seen but by the eyes
Of awed imagination inward bent.

Their vegetation is the viscid ooze,
Whose mysteries are past belief or thought.
Creation seems around them devil-wrought,
Or by some cosmic urgence gone distraught.
Adown their precipices chill and dense
With the dank midnight creep or crawl or climb
Such tentacled and eyeless things of slime,
Such monster shapes as tempt us to accuse
Life of a miscreative impotence.

About their peaks the shark, their eagle, floats,
In the thick azure far beneath the air,
Or downward sweeps upon what prey may dare
Set forth from any silent weedy lair.
But one desire on all their slopes is found,
Desire of food, the awful hunger strife,
Yet here, it may be, was begun our life,
Here all the dreams on which our vision dotes
In unevolved obscurity were bound.

Too strange it is, too terrible! And yet
It matters not how we were wrought or whence
Life came to us with all its throb intense,
If in it is a Godly Immanence.
It matters not,—if haply we are more
Than creatures half-conceived by a blind force
That sweeps the universe in a chance course:
For only in Unmeaning Might is met
The intolerable thought none can ignore.

Friday poem: Shoal of Sharks

The description of sharks as our “perpetual and perfect kin” is wonderful.

Poetry aside, this account reminds me of my darling friend Sharon, who once beached herself (in a head to toe pink wetsuit) at Llandudno, riding out of the sea and up the sand on her bodyboard, croaking “SHAAAARK!” in warning about the fins she had seen in the water. A lifeguard at whose feet she had landed looked down at her in resignation and replied “Dolphins.” (I am aware that a dolphin is not a porpoise.)

No one likes a pedant, but the collective noun for sharks is a shiver.

Shoal of Sharks – Richard O’Connell

“Oh, look at all the porpoise!” someone shouted
While passengers ran to snap their cameras;
But what they leaned toward was a shoal of sharks
Before us, moving like a floating island:
A seething multitude of tails and fins
Fleeing the fury of a hurricane
Hundreds of miles away. They splashed and swarmed.
Slashing the sea to threads of hissing foam
Beneath us, tossing bellies to the sun.
Staring into the blood pits of our eyes
Ferocious for the flesh and stench of us.
Lucky for us high on our high-tech ark
Looking back on life’s primeval broth
At such perpetual and perfect kin.

Friday poem: Sharks’ Teeth

A meditation on silence:

Sharks’ Teeth – Kay Ryan

Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.