Pot of Gold

We talk, you and  I, of  mindfulness, here in the world above

          water, but what’s below is watchfulness,

                     pure and simple: creatures trying not to be eaten,

          creatures relentlessly prowling or simply waiting for meals to

 

cruise on by. Except maybe parrotfish.

          Ever industrious, ever in motion, it’s hard to find one not

                     chomping on Yucatán limestone reefs. What we see as

          dead, bleached coral or crusted limestone shelves, for them

is re-embodied Fish Delight. Which means I find them by

          eavesdropping. Ah, those castanet choruses clicking, clacking,

                     a coven of  promises leading me on until there:

          below my mask and snorkel, a dozen or more upside-down

Princesses sway as one, in their pink and blue checkerboard

          gowns, their long, long dorsal crowns

                     cobalt-striped, and turquoise, and fuchsia—useless—

          no Prince to be found, not even in fish identification books,

just me and my ardor. Bewitched, each day I hang, transfixed,

          above them in a slightly different

                     place in that once-pristine, once-undiscovered Yal-Ku lagoon,

          its cradling mix of salt and fresh water

letting me hold myself, and time, and the rest of the world

          stock still. Sometimes I’m even luckier: out of the deepest

                     shadows (as out of my book) ventures

          the shy Midnight Parrot, a constellation of neon blue

mosaic scrawled on its head, its body—two feet long—

          as dark as blue can get and still

                     not be black, its parrot beak (that family

          trait) munching rocks and shitting sand. Puffs of it,

great big clouds of  it, murking the water until

          finally settling down

                     (it’s how, some scientists

          say, sandy floors of  tropical reefs are born).

But had I dared the slightest move, my Midnight

          would have, just like that, become Dawn.

                     And so it could have been, as well, with that one

          tremendous fish, secretive, off at the edge, among

the maze of  boulders piled on boulders, broken sandstone

          columns, deep channels between them, there—

                     in a shaft of  sun, the end of all my seeking

          and what I hadn’t known I’d sought—three feet long, at least

and all alone, clown-sized lips and eyelids the brightest possible aqua

          blue in an orange-gold face,

                     the way a child might rub its mother’s most dramatic

          eye shadow onto the most unlikely places:

forehead, cheeks, even the outermost edges of  every single

          emerald-green fin, even the edge of  the deep red tail, its tips

                     turned up at the corners—that tremendous fish was eating

          nothing, that fish wasn’t moving at all, except it turned its head

and one tremendous eye caught mine. And held it. Taut.

          Oh, I almost stopped

                     breathing. And the fish stopped

          everything, too, except for slowly pulsing gills—opening,

closing, opening, closing—in sync with my own

          pounding heart. Was I

                     the watcher or the watched? How long did we stay

          like that, hooked to one another, held in water’s palm,

as through my every cell, over and over, rang Rainbow, unstoppable

          Rainbow, until I had no beginning, I had no end,

                     Rainbow I was and happily would

          be still, had not a wayward cloud blundered in.