Catch of the Day

The Fish 

I caught a tremendous fish 

and held him beside the boat

half out of 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 venerable 

and homely. Here and there 

his brown skin hung in strips 

like ancient wallpaper, 

and its pattern of darker brown 

was like wallpaper: 

shapes like full-blown roses 

stained and lost through age. 

He was speckled with barnacles, 

fine rosettes oflime, 

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 feathrs, 

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 admired 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, we, and weaponlike, 

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 oarlocks on their strings, 

the gunnels -- until everything 

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 

And I let the fish go.

--Elizabeth Bishop