The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
with tiny white sea-lice,
but shallower, and yellowed,
and held him beside the boat
and underneath two or three
the irises backed and packed
half out of water, with my
rags of green weed hung down.
with tarnished tinfoil
hook
While his gills were breathing
seen through the lenses
fast in a corner of its mouth.
in
of old scratched isinglass6.
He didn’t fight.
the terrible oxygen
They shifted a little, but not
He hadn’t fought at all.
— the frightening gills,
to return my stare.
He hung a grunting weight,
fresh and crisp with blood,
— It was more like the tipping
battered and venerable1
that can cut so badly —
of an object toward the light.
and homely2. Here and there
I thought of the coarse white
I admired his sullen face,
his brown skin hung in strips
flesh
the mechanism of his jaw,
like ancient wallpaper,
packed in like feathers,
and then I saw
and its pattern of darker
the big bones and the little
that from his lower lip
brown
bones,
— if you could call it a lip —
was like wallpaper:
the dramatic reds and blacks
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
shapes like full-blown roses
of his shiny entrails5,
hung five old pieces of fish-
stained and lost through age.
and the pink swim-bladder
line,
He was speckled with
like a big peony.
or four and a wire leader
barnacles3,
I looked into his eyes
with the swivel still attached,
fine rosettes4 of lime,
which were far larger than
with all their five big hooks
and infested
mine
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
end
And I let the fish go.
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 bilge7
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts8,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels9 — until
everything
1: venerable- honorable
2: homely- ugly
3: barnacles- small crusty sea
creatures
4: rosettes: small rose shapes
5: entrails- guts
6: isinglass- old-fashioned glass
7: bilge- waste water in the bottom
of the boat
8: thwarts- seats or benches
9: gunnels- upper edge of the boat