The Goose Fish

On the long shore, lit by the

To show them properly alone,

Two lovers suddenly

So that their shadows were as one.

The ordinary night was

For them by the swift tide of

That silently they took at flood,

And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised.

Then, as if shaken by

Beneath the hard moon's bony light,

They stood together on the

Embarrassed in each other's

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

To lovers who a little

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

Together peaceful and obscene;

They knew not what he would express,

So finished a

He might mean failure or success,

But took it for an emblem

Their sudden, new and guilty

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

But never did explain the

That so amused him, lying

While the moon went down to

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.