Es muss sein
– Ludwig van Beethoven
Oh La La La,
You stocky
clown triggerfish
with your yellow-
blotched caudal
peduncle and your spangles
of white. You think
I’ll meet you at the reef slopes
like a desperate lover
near the punch bowl
at a Sadie Hawkins dance,
but I keep
to my reading at night,
find the map from my
self to my
other self. If I could
name the ocean that holds you, I’d
decline. Your
dominion is absolute
and beautiful—a salvation
in a fount of drowning. Like
gravity before we
understand it or subside. You are
the number on the other side
of one-hundred, the donation
of salt to wonder, the little God
propped up next to a little,
edible world. But you
know that already,
don’t you, you water
parter, you diurnal swimmer,
you saucy, scampering,
stand-up routine of a fish?
Freckled Fish
Fish that preferred
the polka to the stripe,
that lifted heavy, sexless
eggs into its mouth,
proud and protective,
histrionic and hoarding
underwater drama
into the copper
of its fins. Rotten
with beauty, hideous,
I tell you,
with its fickle
commitment
to camouflage,
its feathered
flair, its golden-silver
startle of sky—
a reflection slid between
waves, the way
a note is slid beneath
a bedroom door. I never
meant to read it,
Lord, forgive me—
the fish, it was yours.
Gold Spotted Rabbitfish
You that lurked half-thug
among the pebbles, world-worn
but waggish—gave you Paly Frags
and you ate them. Flowers of the reef,
same. Put to your eyes the beauty
of camouflage, and you became it.
What was broken in you
broke waves until the others
were pulled through your hunger
into the imaginary
planets and pouches
of your stomach. All gold spotted
you were above your metallic
base of blue—on the other side
of social, in the orchard
of your private circulations,
like a thought I once had
but can’t remember
though I beckon with pellets
and messages of support.
Melissa Studdard is the author of the poetry collections Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, as well as the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. She is the recipient of The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and the REELpoetry International Film Festival Audience Choice Award. Learn more at www.melissastuddard.com.
Read or listen to “Gaius villosus,” a poem by Melissa Studdard also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo of clown triggerfish by Amada44, courtesy Wikimedia.
