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Posts Tagged ‘fish’

When Mom Suggests I Could Rest My Head in Her Lap

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2022| 8 Comments »




I resist. There is so much to do,
but soon my eyes are closed
and Mom is pulling her fingers
through my hair the way I love
and I am ten again, or four,
or twenty-five, or two,
lying on the plaid couch
in our old house
with my head in Mom’s lap,
her fingers in my hair.
I wake up drenched in forever,
this timeless stream
I sometimes can see for what it is—
like a fish that leaps for a fly
and sees, oh! an infinite world
beyond the world it knows.
Is it any wonder, this water
clinging to my cheek
as I rise from the couch
and swim back into the night.  

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One Disentanglement

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

casting a broken net—

I catch no fish,

but oh, the pull of the sea

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What Ritual Is

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 27, 2014| 1 Comment »

Om Asato Maa Sad-Gamaya
Tamaso Maa Jyotir-Gamaya
Mrtyor-Maa Amrtam Gamaya

(Sanskrit: Om, lead us from the unreality to the Reality, from the dark to the light, from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality)

By morning, all the fish are dead.
The silvery minnow. The pale pink gourami.
Both angelfish. They’re all dead, floating
in the tank upside down, two on the bottom,

the others dull at the top. Their eyes
are not yet gauzy. We wake and question what could
have happened. We check the thermometer.
It’s normal. Then what? Did they battle? Was it something

in the water? We wonder what we could have done
to have saved them. It is terrible, the loss, the not
knowing, the feeling of remorse. We long to make
it right somehow, but death has merciless laws.

So we carry them in a bowl to the river
past the willows that survived last night’s frost.
And we release them into the current,
singing them on their way with a song of transition,

though we know that the song is for us.

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