http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-03/InnerEye.html

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/102198-elizabeth-bishops-enduring-lure/

As in all the few poems I’ve read by Thomas Brady, in other words the ones he’s accidentally dropped over the edge of the boat in which he’s still just cutting bait, like this one, he writes about everything but what he’s really doing which is getting ready for the really big strike, the one that will make all those years of anonymity and waiting worthwhile.

This poem is no exception—for it’s about the ultimate poetry just as much as Seamus Heaney’s “A Daylight Art” is about the ultimate poetry, and just as good.

And just as confident in its narrative art, and just as fine and free of clutter–not trying to be poetry because the craft has become the art.

Does anyone know what death is just before it happens?

Some say we long to know it all the time.
Poetry hints at it, with sounds of words
Saying what is underlying, when snakes

Sense what the child knows when unkindness is by.

. . . . . . . .

You brought your books back; poetry failed you;
Poetry in books was too full of silences…

And the wonderful thing about this poem is that all you can do is read it again and again and let it happen all on its own. It’s not a good choice for a class or workshop, in other words, because you’re paid to talk about it there, not just read it. But if you don’t read it and let it happen in and through itself this poem doesn’t do its thing any more than those fish do in the trunk of the car continue swimming, betrayed by the murderous air. Like this:

If only we could get back

To the dream of sex which is not sex,

The prince, the arms, the tan face,

The castle, the explanations, mother, father,

Brother, sister, the conquering, the sand,

The waters, the coughing, the poetry,

The light just above you as you look up,

You’re a fish, swimming towards the boy,

he boy in the boat with his grandfather,

The boy is listening to his grandfather tell a joke;

You will interrupt, you will startle the boy’s line;

You will be pulled up on the boat,

You will be kept, to die, slowly,

And the boy will no longer know what to think.

But the idea was to die for him.

The idea was to save his life.

In Scotland the salmon mount all the great rivers to spawn, and everybody knows the photograph of the fly fisherman with his waders, tweed hat and jacket casting for the trophy in the late afternoon water. But grown-up fishermen never get them all, now or ever, and the kings of the river continue up and up their dwindling domain over falls and rapids until, thin and pale and desperate, they slow to a standstill under the bank of a small rivulet way up in the Dumfries hills not far from the shepherd’s cottage. Tommy MacTaggart, tough but small for us age, knows that, and when no one’s looking he creeps out to the edge of the brook on all fours and reaches a long, thin arm down into the water as far as it can go under the bank until there’s a body moving between his fingers. And he grabs, with both hands now, and has the whole Atlantic in his hands!

That’s called in the local Scot’s dialect “guddling,” and it’s illegal–but I never saw that deter a boy.

Thanks so much for that, Tom–I think you’d be surprised how many times I’ll read it.

And the other poem I have of course in mind is Stanley Kunitz’s “King of the River.”

Christopher

As a boy I learned to accept the fishes’ death.
On fishing trips with my grandfather I silently hoped the fish
Would somehow live. After a long drive from the lake,

When the trunk of the car was opened,
The pickerels would still be breathing,
Their gills quivering in the murderous air.
I sensed my grandfather’s indifference;
Sorrow brooded without sound on my lips
As I watched the straight, wet creatures staring,
Their fins, nor their scales, able to help them.

What pity I felt for stern fish who solemnly lazed in streams,
Inscrutable monsters who lived in the flood!
And now a sad excitement comes on me like a flood,
Weakening everything in me but memory,
Death disguised in dreams,
Dreams of dream lakes, peering within.

Fishing in dreams, the fish
Of strange dimensions brushing by each other, writhing,
Beautiful, mysterious, hidden partially by the dark.

Before I hooked a worm or caught a fish, and sex
Was only something I knew disguised,
I dreamed of two creatures,
One fat, one long, struggling to the death
In a wooden tub of water, barely large enough to hold them,
A scene which changed my innocence innocently.

I founded my religion in a pond.
You could see me hunched over on summer days
In the slime where salamanders were hiding.

I feared for the safety of worms
We used for bait. Because fish devoured worms, I felt
Less pity for fish and gradually I felt less pity
And sorrow for all.

I cannot describe what I felt in my heart when I saw a minnow
In the mouth of a snake.

Does anyone know what death is just before it happens?
Some say we long to know it all the time.
Poetry hints at it, with sounds of words
Saying what is underlying, when snakes
Sense what the child knows when unkindness is by.

Here’s the brook, the forest, the hungry trout,
The dream of sex which is not sex,
The hungry sweetness of it all,
The sunlight, the mist, the mad-life child.

You returned from the woods with your books,
After reading against a tree,
Nature and flies annoyed you,
You brought your books back; poetry failed you;
Poetry in books was too full of silences,
The wood too full of noises.

And when sex, the adolescent feeling sex,
Suddenly comes for the first time
While just lying on your bedroom floor, alone;
You live with it, you marry it,
It keeps you company,
Through the years,
And poetry, lying in open secret,
Becomes your companion too.

If only we could get back
To the dream of sex which is not sex,
The prince, the arms, the tan face,
The castle, the explanations, mother, father,
Brother, sister, the conquering, the sand,
The waters, the coughing, the poetry,
The light just above you as you look up,
You’re a fish, swimming towards the boy,
The boy in the boat with his grandfather,
The boy is listening to his grandfather tell a joke;

You will interrupt, you will startle the boy’s line;
You will be pulled up on the boat,
You will be kept, to die, slowly,
And the boy will no longer know what to think.
But the idea was to die for him.
The idea was to save his life.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/search.html?q=fish&refinement=poems&disp_type=Poems

One of my faves is Frank Stanford’s “The Snake Doctors,” a rather scary poem.

Ted Hughes, Pike

Christopher