I.
To them the sky is as blue as the world from which they came:
the flying fish, failing to wing the zephyrs that push the waves
toward the shore, reach and reach again in schools of finlike
eagerness to the light above, to the moment where the water
and wind end and meet like age-old comrades equally confused
because they are only fish—with wings, it seems—but who
can blame them for trying to be like birds in momentary bursts,
driven by some cosmic memory of a time when leaving was
the best option a fish had.
Get your wings on, gang, let’s go!
Hurry now, the sun is low
and then it’s under the water again—that lightless place we know.
II.
But honestly, sighed the postgrad, Why the hell do they bother?
If they only knew what plates waited by which fork and knife,
what old human stew they could be conscripted to recipe,
and for which old dry-mouthed mutineer afloat on some dinghy
with hook and twine a banquet you would make.
Flying fish—any fish—devoid of any clear memory of things
and yet living in perfect, abstract, clownlike harmony with
this absurd notion that a fish flying is better than a fish swimming.
Mocked and mocked again over the eons it took for wings to shape;
encouraged by the fat flightless penguins, who honk as they pass,
We can neither fly too! We failed—
So did we, lament the flying fish through
a sigh, But we still try.
III.
As old and as new as all things—flying fish: Marveled at, eaten, ridiculed.
The gull, the tern, the albatross—they all drop into the ocean eventually;
ships sink, shores erode, beach houses encroach, and where the rivers run
into seas, the bracken halls that lead to Atlantis—this is what the flying fish
speak of when they light the noonday currents in far-off sea as bright jesters
seeking just one more moment in the sun.
