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predicament with other life on earth. We can’t go back and save those yet-to-
be-dismantled elms, but “how live” they are, “still standing” in Uncle George ’s
painting as in “Poem.” This is what art, what memory, what words can do.
“I wish I knew as much... as she does,” said Hemingway the great angler
about “The Fish,” seventy-six taut verses from another geography of hers, Key
West, Florida. Wedged amid marine and piscine data, our hero marks her way
without explaining anything: “I caught a tremendous fish... I thought of the
coarse white flesh... I looked into his eyes... I admired his sullen face... I
saw that from his lower lip... I stared and stared... And I let the fish go.”
Her mind ’s movement plays against the “grunting weight,” the “battered and
venerable” creature ’s barnacle-speckled, sea-lice-infested body, not in disgust
but close-up gusto.
Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper.Wallpaper, whimsical, offsets nature ’s raw fact with a sort of beauty.
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,... his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
Exactness plays with odd similes—like feathers, like a peony—making the fish
both familiar and strange.
“I looked into his eyes” and found
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
Preciseness, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, signals praise of God ’s Creation. For
Bishop, not quite that, but a poet ’s, a painter’s greeting of the spirit—a greeting
unreturned, as “I admired his sullen face.” She ’s nothing to him. From her
catch’s lower lip