Sound arrives before sight here, and it arrives oddly. The opening phrase, "went & going noise," has no settled tense: the noise has already left and is still leaving, yet it makes "a swell in ground" that is "audible / in walls surround us." We seem to be enclosed by something, a room or a hull or a body of water, and we feel it before we can name it. There is no end-rhyme anywhere in the poem, but the ear is held by an echo of vowels: ground, surround, sound, sounded, and later count. The swell is built into the language as well as described by it.
Then words are "heard thru water thru / sound," and a pun opens up. To sound water is to measure its depth, so "sounded to a state of going" can mean both made audible and plumbed. The "mapping of words" is lowered into a medium to see how deep it goes. It is an uneasy map, since what it records is heard rather than seen.
Only after a colon does the fish appear: "fish in water / presage movement a / passage." The line break after "a" makes us wait for "passage," so the form performs the word. Next comes the poem's strangest image, "hole cut in wood / that fish in / birch shd look happy." Judging by the imagery, a fish has been cut into birch, or a hole has been cut to fit one. Either way the fish exists through cutting, and the demand that it "look happy" is comic and faintly disturbing, like asking a carving to forgive its carver.
From here the poem becomes an argument about attention. "That looking shd be seeing / as a fish is being": looking is effortful and aimed, while seeing is simply received, the way a fish simply is. The fish is "not seen or point to see / all," so the point is not to take in everything. Then the grammar reverses: the observer is "pointed / by the being of the fish." The fish directs us, not the other way round. The ethical turn follows quickly, with its tangled phrase "the less doing not / to do violence to the fish." Every verb in the poem (cut, point, count) is a small act of force, and the best one can hope for is to do less.
Counting is the clearest case. "Count the number of fins / number these fins frm one thru / enough." We expect a total, but the sequence ends in a word that is not a number. "Enough" is the only quantity the poem will give. The speaker has been absent until now, and when it does appear it is a bare verb: "fills doing / & am / done." The "I" has dwindled to "am," as if looking hard enough erased the looker.
The last image is a physical one: "thick as a thumb / clogged w/ words." I read this as the hole in the birch, stopped up like a bottle by a thumb. The passage the fish was meant to swim through is blocked by the language used to describe it. The final "enough" can then mean either "that is sufficient" or "stop." The poem cannot tell us which, and that ambiguity seems intended.
The typed shorthand supports this reading. "&," "w/," "shd," "frm" and "thru" make the text look like notes jotted down rather than a finished statement. Lowercase and almost no punctuation let phrases slide into each other, so "that looking shd be seeing" can lean forwards or backwards. The colons work as hinges where the thought swings to a new angle.
The poem is worth reading because it enacts the problem it describes. It asks how one can attend to a living thing without cutting, counting or naming it into submission, and it does so in words, the very material it accuses of clogging the passage. It offers no answer, only a gesture of restraint, and ends by calling its own speech too thick. For a reader it works as a lesson in slow attention.