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 and 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