The Goose Fish

On the long shore, lit by the moon

To show them properly alone,

Two lovers suddenly embraced

So that their shadows were as one.

The ordinary night was graced

For them by the swift tide of blood

That silently they took at flood,

And for a little time they prized

  Themselves emparadised.

Then, as if shaken by stage-fright

Beneath the hard moon's bony light,

They stood together on the sand

Embarrassed in each other's sight

But still conspiring hand in hand,

Until they saw, there underfoot,

As though the world had found them out,

The goose fish turning up, though dead,

  His hugely grinning head.

There in the china light he lay,

Most ancient and corrupt and grey.

They hesitated at his smile,

Wondering what it seemed to say

To lovers who a little while

Before had thought to understand,

By violence upon the sand,

The only way that could be known

  To make a world their own.

It was a wide and moony grin

Together peaceful and obscene;

They knew not what he would express,

So finished a comedian

He might mean failure or success,

But took it for an emblem of

Their sudden, new and guilty love

To be observed by, when they kissed,

  That rigid optimist.

So he became their patriarch,

Dreadfully mild in the half-dark.

His throat that the sand seemed to choke,

His picket teeth, these left their mark

But never did explain the joke

That so amused him, lying there

While the moon went down to disappear

Along the still and tilted track

  That bears the zodiac.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York. He died of cancer at his home in University City, Missouri on July 5th 1991.