So utterly without misgiving To be a fish In the waters.
Loveless, and so lively! Born before God was love, Or life knew loving. Beautifully beforehand with it all.
Admitted, they swarm in companies, Fishes. They drive in shoals. But soundless, and out of contact. They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger. Not one touch. Many suspended together, forever apart. Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with the rest.
A magnetism in the water between them only.
I saw a water-serpent swim across the Anapo, And I said to my heart, look, look at him! With his head up, steering like a bird! He’s a rare one, but he belongs…
But sitting in a boat on the Zeller lake And watching the fishes in the breathing waters Lift and swim and go their way—
I said to my heart, who are these? And my heart couldn’t own them… A slim young pike, with smart fins And grey-striped suit, a young cub of a pike Slouching along away below, half out of sight, Like a lout on an obscure pavement…
Aha, there’s somebody in the know!
But watching closer That motionless deadly motion, That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose,… I left off hailing him.
I had made a mistake, I didn’t know him, This grey, monotonous soul in the water, This intense individual in shadow, Fish-alive.
I didn’t know his God, I didn’t know his God.
Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us.
I saw, dimly, Once a big pike rush. And small fish fly like splinters. And I said to my heart, there are limits To you, my heart; And to the one God. Fish are beyond me.
Other Gods Beyond my range… gods beyond my God.
They are beyond me, are fishes. I stand at the pale of my being And look beyond, and see Fish, in the outerwards, As one stands on a bank and looks in.
I have waited with a long rod And suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish, lucent fish from below, And had him fly like a halo round my head, Lunging in the air on the line.
Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth. And seen his horror-tilted eye, His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye; And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb.
And my heart accused itself Thinking: I am not the measure of creation. This is beyond me, this fish. His God stands outside my God.
And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand. And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies, And the water-suave contour dims.
But not before I have had to know He was born in front of my sunrise. Before my day.
He outstarts me. And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him, Have made him die.
Fishes, With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold. And their pre-world loneliness, And more-than-lovelessness. And white meat; They move in other circles.
Outsiders. Water-wayfarers. Things of one element. Aqueous, Each by itself.
Cats, and the Neapolitans, Sulphur sun-beasts. Thirst for fish as for more-than-water; Water-alive To quench their over-sulphureous lusts.
But I, I only wonder And don’t know. I don’t know fishes.
In the beginning Jesus was called The Fish. And in the end.