I first wrote this back on a Sunday evening in November 2006. I didn’t post it then, but it has been on my mind again. The fish in the poem was my youngest daughter’s betta fish.

Fish

Glimpsed through the curve of a straw basket handle,
Dark silhouette of a whirling whisk,
In some compact script communicates:

It is all right

It will be all right.

and in this moment it is true—in this pause—

In her bed my daughter breathes rapidly
Having slipped at last into sleep
Compelled by the Chopin meandering nearby

In the dining room her sister
Crouches intent on the web’s cool fire
By its light scrying her own mottled depths

Down the hall my wife lies in state
Motionless, monotonously urging herself
Along the dry marathon her illness has set

Eight hours out the week awaits us
Below me I hear the earth creak on its axis
Secreting its endless inevitable questions

Perched in peril
Circled in safety
All of us in a wind-tossed nest
I did not expect an answer tonight
Nor a captive fish to answer me best.