180 PA RT T W O
“The Fish” no marine document but, as Moore said of precision, “a thing of
the imagination.”
No wonder the contemporaries she swore by were Wallace Stevens and Wil-
liam Carlos Williams. Note Stevens’s motto: “Things as they are / Are changed
upon the blue guitar.” And the poets’ admiration was mutual. Stevens found
Moore “radiant with imagination” in the “sensitive handling” of reality, and
Williams welcomed “a blasting aside, a dynamization” in verse.
“The Fish” moves on among hard surfaces—barnacles, crevices, cliff,
chasm—turning up things we do and don’t expect in the ocean: jellyfish and rice
grains, crabs and toadstools, even spun glass, iron wedges, stars, burns, hatchet
strokes. We can take it as pure whimsy, though we ’re headed for where “the
submerged shafts of the sun” will spotlight cliff and sea, endlessly combating.
The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shapes, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
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external
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