---

Elizabeth Bishop - The Fish
Work rating: High

	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 with 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.
Source
The script ran 0.001 seconds.