The Fish in the Little Pool by the Patio

are colored red, black, and pearl swimming.
Though her hair remains quite brunette,
her skin has paled and swollen.
The carp that brush her face
remind me of my own and no less sucker-like lips
that wandered there, too. Once.

But, the fish themselves are thinking food thoughts.
They don't remember her long hands with lacquered nails
that scattered freeze-dried insect eggs over our trembling waters,
the ornaments that hung from her wrists, or
the ways her gifts are wasted on them now.

Catfish Laments

Walls of it
banks of it
rolling airborne moisture
is enough to wet these gills
and their pulsing red was pulse for you
An icthic shift of tense
from "being" to "having been" to "used to be"
I am motile
I am walking
across the highway

At the bottom of the aquarium
I am hiding behind the colorful gravel,
wedged behind the aerator,
upside down
Angels and tetras flash angular
but I am smoothly still
and remain so
even when the fingers tap our walls
When we are fed
I am waiting
whiskers stiff for the shreds that settle
down through solution

This place is porcelain
and we writhe within it, shallow
in memory of deep rivers
light laddered waters
and powerless against hooks and lines
how we rose confused and angry
to gasp against a thing called sky
above again ourselves

She Saw An Eel

and it made her sick.
Sick and limply violent.
She wanted to put it in her mouth,
wanted to see how bad it could be.

"Quit that," he told her
and she stopped making her face.
She wrote E-E-L
on her palette with her tongue.


(originally published in the literary journal Tyounyi, New Mexico [1989] and reprinted in Slack magazine, Boulder, Colorado [1993])

Heroes of Language (Part II)

My grandfather told me stories about his friend, an Indian named Enchanted Medicine Dog, and it wasn't until I began working in the library that I was able to guess that his old buddy had been the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse.

My cat is named Pencil and it has recently become apparent that she actually wants to write. Her scrawlings, from stylus held most clumsily between paw and tooth, cannot begin to yet be called language, but there is a meaning rich with feline sensibility and a kind of creeping logic there.

My fish, lock in their glassy locus, have taken to strange loopings that, when traced with soap slivers or grease pens along the aquarium planes, reveal alphabets or perhaps pictograms that point to icthic futures.

My wife, when sleeping, groans softly and runs her hands along my scalp to trace another man's name there.