Gone fishin'

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of the water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and vulnerable

and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wall-paper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wall-paper :

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested 

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

––the frightening gills

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly––

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes 

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

––It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admitted his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

––if you could call it a lip––

grim, wet, and weapon-like,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oar-locks on their strings,

the gunnels––until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow !

And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop

from North and South (1946)