The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook and line caught in his mouth.

He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, a drab and enormous fish.

Like a fossilized bog, he weighed twenty pounds. I didn’t know the fish was a bog until I may have forgotten him.

The fish is going to die.

I stared at the fish while I waited for him to die Then I took my hand away, shamefully.

To the fish I said: I’ll not cut you anymore. Meanwhile I nailed him to the side with a thorn, punctured.

His skin was a rickety shade of blue, his flesh was like jelly: riddled with dottles like an ailing board. His heavy eye was now an exculpative test.

Hell’s grasp and great disdain are twice as terrible as the haunts. I wept when I realized what I had done.

And I thought I might bury him. I laid him on the stone and held him still with my knife. I thought about the boat’s largeness, its wonderful net of wood,

and the green of the sea. Would he belong to me from now until that moment, or would he go? My machine without the bog hurt me. He lay, a dead weight, but I was still dreaming. My mind held a cloud.

I could not give him back, drained and yet suffocated, dragged back, heavier than a tree. I beheld the dozing fish: he lives, just a fish, he lived and shuddered like the ground selected from the trees above him.

• Marianne Moore