The Koi Poetic

Australian poet and blogger friend Gabrielle Bryden has written a poem about my koi and remembers our mutual friend the late Paul Squires in whose poetry magic got caught using words.  I feel very honored to have my koi swim in a poem, and when I tell the koi they will be splashing.  Read it, experience it,  here.

Fish swimming wildly in the pond today

The koi swam in synchronous syllogistic curlicues/in anti-haiku alterred upside downedness

being fish/singing something only fish can hear/some of the fish are bold/some serene/the bold ones seem confident, resolute, fast, rash, nimble

the serene ones seems settled, exuberant, stately, munificent with blue-in-green soft serene cloud-like floating aspect

questions have become all in all

being fish/remembering

Pensive and Coy: Je pense donc je suis

In one picture he wears laurels and looks timid and childlike

in another scene he ventures down into the dark

depths of a familiar unknown

and looks at you as though you understand,

which of course, implies that you’re there although you’re not.

The light strikes the undersides of his face making it luminous pearl

and yet there is no light.

It’s a downward path and into this dark finds comfort

you feel the pull of gravity strenghthen and water above you weighs

on your edges, pushing from all directions and you push back with

muscles meant for exactly this

and all the water above you only puts more distance between you and the

non-fish world.

So security goes downwards until you reach those planes

where you go forward like a swift swimming fish, weight glancing 

away and folding into substance

you slip streaming from its incasement

its pressure pressing you onward.

Your eye globe gleams reflecting back depths to depths

who to see but other strange creatures

either those you eat or those who eat you

(all which would be metaphorical were you human and thinking

but you are fish and slip streaming).

A channel drilled through the planet in the space-time

marks your mass’s trajectory

not part of history but more part of what exists you are

not thinking, yet am-ing.

I am in full fish-mode

A very pencil-y fish here, where lines wiggle like waves of motion in the stream of ideas.  This one has lovely dots, too.  When my daughter was a baby and got her first lessons in art, they consisted of me dotting a paper over which she crawled, which I did while saying, “dot, dot, dot, dot” as I watched her laugh and squeal with delight.

[Top of the post:  Drawing of a Fish I named Pixel, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil]