Fins fletched like wings

Here is Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet of love and revolution, and one of my favourite poets, though I only know him in translation. I chose this one not — as its translator suggests — because it’s shaped like Chile, but because it’s whimsical and lyrical at once. It’s not quite serious, I don’t think, but still it’s in earnest. Like much poetry, and maybe all art, it’s serious play.

I love the idea of a poet standing stock still in the middle of a busy market, musing on a dead fish — diving deep and coming up with riches. This, to me, is part of what animates and exalts poetry: the magnifying glass it trains on ordinary things. When you stop and look through the glass you see the depths and layers you’d otherwise miss, the gleam things wear up close. DG Rossetti said ‘a sonnet is a moment’s monument.’ A poem like this testifies that every moment, each thing, is worthy of such a monument, if you only look. I had to look up ‘catafalque’ – it’s the raised bier on which a casket rests. It’s the right name for the last resting place of a mighty fish. This is ‘Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.’

Here,   

among the market vegetables,

this torpedo

from the ocean   

depths,   

a missile   

that swam,

now  

lying in front of me

dead.
Surrounded

by the earth's green froth   

—these lettuces,

bunches of carrots—

only you   

lived through

the sea's truth, survived

the unknown, the

unfathomable

darkness, the depths   

of the sea,

the great   

abyss,

le grand abîme,

only you:   

varnished

black-pitched   

witness

to that deepest night.



Only you:

dark bullet

barreled   

from the depths,

carrying   

only   

your   

one wound,

but resurgent,

always renewed,

locked into the current,

fins fletched

like wings

in the torrent,

in the coursing

of

the

underwater

dark,

like a grieving arrow,

sea-javelin, a nerveless   

oiled harpoon.
Dead

in front of me,

catafalqued king

of my own ocean;

once   

sappy as a sprung fir

in the green turmoil,

once seed

to sea-quake,

tidal wave, now

simply

dead remains;

in the whole market

yours   

was the only shape left

with purpose or direction

in this   

jumbled ruin

of nature;

you are   

a solitary man of war

among these frail vegetables,

your flanks and prow

black   

and slippery

as if you were still

a well-oiled ship of the wind,

the only

true

machine

of the sea: unflawed,

undefiled,   

navigating now

the waters of death.