At the Fish Markets, Banda Aceh
December 2007, three years after the Boxing Day Tsunami
After Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”
Even this early—
the muezzin’s minor cry
just now floating the first notes,
the minarets not yet
lit, the sun a closed hinge—
the men have arrived, unloading
dawn’s plunder & kill
before arranging the tails
with an octave’s precision:
silvery intervals crossing
the wide banana leaves.
Even before the day’s heat,
the stench—of gut, of saline—
is ripe enough to turn
the stomach. In the trash heaps,
flashes of bone-light appear
like a sudden oracle
beneath the flies’ gray veil.
The prawns pronounce themselves,
a fleet of half-translucence,
while each squid is an apparition
lying quiet & tangled
in its coat of arms. How is it
that its strange retina
is halfway down the body,
but, even now, stares back
as if it must know everything.
Here, everything blue-green:
this deep eye of distance,
the province’s old volcano
plushed by ferns & far-off
fog. There & there & there, the sea
beholds us like a cartoon mirror.
If you were to touch the water
up close, it would be clear
from the skin to the bottom:
lighter, somehow, than
the air we are all born into,
the salt transcending itself
before it hardens again
on earth, clinging to ragged tarps,
corrugations in tin, the scales
that weigh the now-dead
even as the sun pushes up
& on, the day teeming with
new & gorgeous human noise:
prayers of weather, of nets, of wages
living or non. This morning,
more than one voice wavers
as it recounts that wave
swelling at such a distance
before its roar eclipsed the view,
wiped the glass floats
clean. In the market, now,
laid out in their hologram-scales,
the fish appear to lean on the same
silent angle: north, mouths open,
as if wanting to trust another
knowledge. Their longing
a longing synchronized
to the sea. A countless loss.
Their bodies as one body.
Source: Poetry (May 2021)