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Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold,
never to leave your shining birthsuit,
never to spend your inheritance of thin coins?
And who is the stream, who lolls all day
in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather,
singing, a little mad in the head,
opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs,
eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for
news from the interior-oh, who are these lines
that link a big sky to a small stream
that go down for great things:
the cold muscle of the trout,
the shinning scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage,
hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning
and faithful fanatic who will not let go
but holds the false bait and the true worm alike
and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket
in which it will ride to the kitchen
of someone important, perhaps the Pope
who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish
and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying,
"Children, what is it to live in the stream,
day after day, and come at last to the table,
transfigured with spices and herbs,
a little martyr, a little miracle;
children, children, who is this fish?"
Nancy Willard
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Read poems about / on: fish, children, weather, sky, fishing, child, rose
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Comments about this poem (A Wreath To The Fish
by
Nancy Willard
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Nancy Willard
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Hanque O
(4/18/2009 7:00:00 AM) |
I posted your poem Hindsight on the forum last week. I clipped it from the New Yorker how ever many years ago that was. I've kept in my desk drawer as an example of what a poem could be. I'm glad to have the chance to thank you for it.
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Jacob Russell
(5/23/2007 6:17:00 PM) |
Water Walker, a collection of Willard's poems has one I come back to again again-her 'Foxes Fall to St. Francis' from the poems with title borrowed from sport page headlines.
Other favorites from that book: In Praise of Unwashed Feet and Magician's Wives.
I wish there were more of her poems.
Jacob Russell
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David Gerardino
(12/16/2005 4:01:00 PM) |
NANCY, DID YOU WRITE, SKIN OF GRACE?
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