The Lonely Pipefish
Up, up, slender
As an eel’s
Child, weaving
Through water, our lonely
Pipefish seeks out his dinner,
Scanty at best; he blinks
Cut-diamond eyes—snap—he
Grabs morsels so small
Only a lens pinpoints them,
But he ranges all over
That plastic preserve—dorsal
Fin tremulous—snap—and
Another çedilla
Of brine shrimp’s gone ...
We talk on of poetry, of love,
Of grammar; he looks
At a living comma—
Snap—sizzling about
In his two-gallon Caribbean
And grazes on umlauts for breakfast.
His pug nosed, yellow
Mate, aproned in gloom,
Fed rarely, slumped,
Went deadwhite, as we argued on;
That rudder fin, round as a
Pizza cutter, at the
End of his two inch
Fluent stick self, lets his eyes
Pilot his mouth—snap ...
Does his kind remember? Can our kind forget?
Copyright Credit: Barbara Howes, “The Lonely Pipefish” from The Blue Garden. Copyright © 1972 by Barbara Howes. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1995)