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 of lime,

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 feathers,

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, wet, 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.

First I saw the white bear, then I saw the black;
Then I saw the camel with a hump upon his back;
Then I saw the grey wolf, with mutton in his maw;
Then I saw the wombat waddle in the straw;
Then I saw the elephant a-waving of his trunk;
Then I saw the monkeys—mercy, how unpleasantly they smelt!

^{—after Alexander Lumans and Jennifer Ackerman}

Among them, a common language of alarm.

Also, rapture.

Know that when zebra finches felt the first pinch
of climate change, they chirped to their offspring, still shelled,
to warn, to insist, they hatch
                                                                         smaller and fiercer.
Dawn’s chorus is a peace-making operation.
The birds with the biggest eyes sing first.
                                                                         Thus light
is the first part of song.

Some birds create barriers
                                    of pinging notes—golden bells dangling

in the air, alarms and warnings. Does it matter

what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.

In bird language, there’s a call for mobbing, a call for fleeing.

                                   To avoid danger, sometimes you must approach it.

In the shell, a bird recognizes its parents’ voices.
In love, mates sing duets they invent together.
On death, the survivor must learn a new tune.

There are such things as universal truths.

                                   Some kites drop fire onto the earth to scare
                                                                                            up dinner. Some kites,

                                   dropping fire, taught humans their first warm meal.

Neither ice nor snow lived long enough
to hear the last bird sing—just wind,

which carried those notes as far as it could
before they slipped from its palms—

                                   There is a common language of alarm.