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.
