THE FISH

ELIZABETH BISHOP

I caught a tremendous fish of his shiny entrails,

and held him beside the boat and the pink swim-bladder
half out of water, with my hook like a big peony.
fast in a corner of his mouth. I looked into his eyes
He didn’t fight. which were far larger than mine
He hadn’t fought at all. but shallower, and yellowed,
He hung a grunting weight, the irises backed and packed
battered and venerable with tarnished tinfoil
and homely. Here and there seen through the lenses
his brown skin hung in strips of old scratched isinglass.
like ancient wallpaper, They shifted a little, but not
and its pattern of darker brown to return my stare.
was like wallpaper: —It was more like the tipping
shapes like full-blown roses of an object toward the light.
stained and lost through age. I admired his sullen face,
He was speckled with barnacles, the mechanism of his jaw,
fine rosettes of lime, and then I saw
and infested that from his lower lip
with tiny white sea-lice, —if you could call it a lip—
and underneath two or three grim, wet, and weaponlike,
rags of green weed hung down. hung five old pieces of fish-line,
While his gills were breathing in or four and a wire leader
the terrible oxygen with the swivel still attached,
—the frightening gills, with all their five big hooks
fresh and crisp with blood, grown firmly in his mouth.
that can cut so badly— A green line, frayed at the end
I thought of the coarse white flesh where he broke it, two heavier lines,
packed in like feathers, and a fine black thread
the big bones and the little bones, still crimped from the strain and snap
the dramatic reds and blacks when it broke and he got away.
 THE FISH
(CONTINUED BELOW)

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.
 LEAVING ONE
RALPH ANGEL

I don't want any numbers. We, right here, belong to us.

I'm worn out beforehand. But I'm calling the shots now,
I don't care about and now I'm leaving this hotel.
who's sleeping with whom. With all we've lost already
I only know what people don't tell me, our pores are wide open.
how it's difficult to be a human being, And it's cold out there.
that the complication begins inside Come drive with me.
the way loneliness can't be
located in any one part of the body,
that it rises to the surface
where the soul should be
and rears its ugly head
in the face of anything tender,
those fingers of yours, those knees.

You sit beside me at the window.

We are not drinking the coffee,
we don't eat the toast.
Outside, in the park, two huge maples
are ablaze with Indian summer,
and absolutely still.
People parade the sidewalks, rush
against one another at crossings.
No one needs to understand anything
to get the goods on everyone.
It's the way of morning,
a malicious, well-trained avoidance.

My staying here
would not protect you, these fingers
of yours, the soul in your shy eyes,
I'd simply go down trying.
 A CAT IN AN 
EMPTY APARTMENT
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Die—you can’t do that to a cat. Just wait till he turns up,

Since what can a cat do just let him show his face.
in an empty apartment? Will he ever get a lesson
Climb the walls? on what not to do to a cat.
Rub up against the furniture? Sidle toward him
Nothing seems different here as if unwilling
but nothing is the same. and ever so slow
Nothing’s been moved on visibly offended paws,
but there’s more space. and no leaps or squeals at least to
And at nighttime no lamps are lit. start.

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start

at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.

Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned
up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.
 APPLES
DEBORAH DIGGES

FOR MY FATHER

Everyone brings flowers

and I bring apples sent from Milton,
Josephus, Hesperides, three
red, one gold, like a flower.

It is the evening of his eleven labor,

the prophets gathering at his bedside.

Everyone brings flowers but I bring apples,

place one in his palm
and close his fingers around the seasons
like faces, ballast,

three red, one golden.

Who knows which he’ll recognize,

what phantom feature, son

or daughter calling
past dark from the orchard trees.

I bring down apples burning, burning yellow

in the white room.

Even the windows is nothing to these three

red, on golden, like a fire
we warm our hands over,

our hands over his hands

in this small camp above the city, everyone
with flowers.
I have brought apples,
three red, one golden, like flower.
 MICHIKO NOGAMI
JACK GILBERT

Is she more apparent because she is not

anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake
with the sound of their petals falling.”
 EATING ALONE
LI-YOUNG LEE

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.

The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father

among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning

waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas

fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
 THE POTTER
PETER LEVITT

The potter,

innocent of all

he makes

how could he know

his bowl would hold the moon?

 BLACK DOG, RED DOG
STEPHEN DOBYNS

EXCERPT FROM BLACK DOG, RED DOG (1984)

The boy waits on the top step, hand on the door

to the screen porch. A green bike lies in the grass,
saddlebags stuffed with folded newspapers. The street
is lined with maples in full green of summer, white houses
set back from the road. The man whom the boy has come
to collect from shuffles onto the porch. As is his custom,
he wears a gray dress with flowers. Lon gray hair
covers his shoulders, catches in a week’s growth of beard.
The boy opens the door and glancing down sees yellow
streaks of urine running down the man’s legs, snaking
into the gray socks and loafers. For a year, the boy
has delivered the man’s papers, mowed and raked his lawn.
He’s even was inside the house which stinks of excrement
and garbage, with forgotten bags of groceries an tables:
rotten fruit, moldy bread, packages of unopened hamburger.
He would wait in the hall as the man counted out pennies
from a paper bag, adding five extra out of kindness.
The boy thinks of when the man’s mother was alive.
He would sneak up to the house when the music began
and watch the man and his mother dance cheek to cheek
around the kitchen, slowly, hesitantly, as if each
thought the other could break as easily as a china plate.
The mother had been dead a week when a neighbor found her
and even then her son wouldn’t let her go. The boy sat
on the curb watching the man hurl his fat body against
the immaculate state troopers who tried not to touch him
but only keep him from where men from funeral home
carried out his mother wrapped in red blankets, smelling
like hamburger left for weeks on the umbrella stand.
 BLACK DOG, RED DOG
(CONTINUED BELOW)

Today as the boy waits on the top step watching the urine
trickle into the man’s socks, he raises his head to see
the pale blue eyes fixed upon him with their wrinkles and
bags and zigzagging red lines. As he stares into them,
he begins to believe he is staring out of those eye,
looking down on the thin blond boy on his front steps.
Then he lifts his head and still through the man’s eyes
he sees the softness of late afternoon light on the street
where the man has spent his entire life, sees the green
of summer, white Victorian houses as through a white fog
so they shimmer and flicker before him. Looking past
the houses, past the first fields, he sees the reddening
sky of sunset, sees the land rushing west as if wanted
to smash itself as completely as a cup thrown to the floor,
violently pursuing the sky with great spirals of red wind.

Abruptly the boy steps back. When he looks again into

the man’s eyes, they appear bottomless and sad; and he
he wants to touch his arm, say he’s sorry about his mother,
sorry he’s crazy, sorry he lets urine run down his leg
and wears a dress. Instead, he gives him his paper
and leaves. As he raises his bike, he looks put toward
red sky and darkening earth, and they seem poised
like two animals that have always hated each other,
each fiercely wanting to tear out the other’s throat:
black dog, red dog—now more despising, more resolved.
 THE WORD
MARK COX

I get in between the covers as quietly as I can.

Her hand is on my pillow and I put my face as close
as I can without waking her up. We made salad yesterday
and her fingertips still smell of green pepper and onions.
I feel homey, almost safe, breathing this, remembering
the way we washed the vegetables under cold water, peeled,
then sliced them with the harmless little knife her sister
gave us for Christmas. I feel childish and gently pull
the blanket over my head, barely youching my lips
to the short, ragged fingernails she chews while talking
to her mother on the phone. These days there's so much bad news
from home. Old people who keep living and living awfully,
babies who stop breathing for no reason at all.
I am so close to her that if I were to speak one word
silently, she would feel it and toss the covers to one side,
and for this reason I'll say nothing as long as I can.
Let the sheet stiffen above us, I have nothing to say.
Not about their lives or my own life.
Not about the branches so weighted with snow
they don't brush our window anymore.
Not about the fact that the only way I can touch anymore
at all, the only way I can speak, is by trying not to.
"What's left, what's left, what's left," my dog breathes
in his sleep. Lately I snore badly in a language
only he understands. I've been trying so hard to teach,
I've been trying so hard to switch bodies
with ythe young people in my classes that last week, when the dog
woke me and wanted to go out, I took his face in my hands
and told him not to be afraid. "You know so much already," I said.
"You are talented and young, you have something to give people,
 THE WORD
(CONTINUED BELOW)

I wouldn't lie to you."

Rita told this story as we sat around the salad with friends,
repeating again and again how the dog closed his eyes and basked.
Sleep is also the only place I can type with more than three
fingers, I said. But I thought, it's true, all this,
I speak best and most fully in my sleep. When my heart
is not wrapped in layer after layer of daylight, not prepared
like some fighter's taped fist.
She sleeps, her hand next to my mouth, the number
for the 24-hour bank machine fading on its palm.
The word starts briefly from between my lips, then turns back.
The word sifts deeper into what my life is.
 DEATH
MAURYCY SZYMEL

I got used to warm sheets,

to a woman, black coffee, and to vodka.
I fell in love with my snow, covered hut,
and hunger, satiety, and soft songs.

I wouldn’t be able to live without a cigarette

and I would die without a view of this clouded sky,
without a handkerchief
or flowers pleasing to my eye.

A cemetery at midnight horrifies me,

and the unfeeling table I write this poem on,
and your passionate, autumn eyes
through which death peers.

But when I lay my forehead against the wall,

it smells of your neck, lips, your hair,
and hay,
and water green with frogs and stars.

So I caress the table, windows, lampshade,

like your warm breasts in the dark ripened by night.
And when we nestle face to face,
I understand that there is no death.

translated from the original Polish by Jerzy and Aniela Gregorek