Look at this thing.

This dead creator was witness to the impossible and unknowable depths, a king in its environment and now it’s on a bed of lettuce waiting to be eaten by some guy who couldn’t even breathe in its environment.

It was a weapon, a predator! But one whack from some guy on a boat and now it’s laid out with the rabbit food as though that’s right. As though it doesn’t deserve more honour and reverence than to sit with the vegetarian nom noms in a market place as though it wasn’t a king in its own ‘lands’.

So it’s physically about the fish, but it’s not really about the fish. It’s about juxtaposition and this crazy reality of existence. From a king, a weapon, a bringer of terror in the deep, to an easy dinner on land with no thought to how it had existed before.

It feels disingenuous to me to say that the poem is somehow about mundane objects “oh I can write about any old thing and make it interesting,” when the topic is death! Life! Change! Those are VERY poetic topics… he just came at them through a fish.

Is it the ‘Tism?

I find myself wondering if it’s something of an autism ‘thing’ whereby I have a lot of trouble with this language? The idea that someone would say with a straight face that this is about a fish feels bonkers. On the one hand, it’s literally about a damn fish, right? And we’re told again and again that us ‘tisms are literal with the language. So, I should be ok with the idea that this poem is about a fish.

But it isn’t! It just isn’t about a fish!

So is it literally (we’re getting a lot of mileage out of that word) not about the fish, which is why I’m having so much trouble with this idea? Or have I now double faked myself out and we’re in an intellectual death spiral? Like the damn fish about whom this poem is NOT.

Starting back at University is turning out to be pretty interesting. Not so much in the content as such, I’m doing first year classes and I’m 40 with a decade long work history in the arts. But the way it’s making me look at my own thinking and HOW I think and what influences what I think.

I hope very much no one ended up here looking for help engaging with the poem. I doubt very much I’ve given anyone anything helpful. I’m more exploring for myself how I think about the poem.

Here, 
among the market vegetables, 
this torpedo 
from the ocean 
depths, 
a missile 
that swam, 
now 
lying in front of me 
dead. 

Surrounded 
by the earth’s green froth 
—these lettuces, 
bunches of carrots— 
only you 
lived through 
the sea’s truth, survived 
the unknown, the 
unfathomable 
darkness, the depths 
of the sea, 
the great 
abyss, 
le grand abîme, 
only you: 
varnished 
black-pitched 
witness 
to that deepest night. 

Only you: 
dark bullet 
barreled 
from the depths, 
carrying 
only 
your 
one wound, 
but resurgent, 
always renewed, 
locked into the current, 
fins fletched 
like wings 
in the torrent, 
in the coursing 
of 
the 
underwater 
dark, 
like a grieving arrow, 
sea-javelin, a nerveless 
oiled harpoon. 

Dead 
in front of me, 
catafalqued king 
of my own ocean; 
once 
sappy as a sprung fir 
in the green turmoil, 
once seed 
to sea-quake, 
tidal wave, now 
simply 
dead remains; 
in the whole market 
yours 
was the only shape left 
with purpose or direction 
in this 
jumbled ruin 
of nature; 
you are 
a solitary man of war 
among these frail vegetables, 
your flanks and prow 
black 
and slippery 
as if you were still 
a well-oiled ship of the wind, 
the only 
true 
machine 
of the sea: unflawed, 
undefiled, 
navigating now 
the waters of death.