The poem is a fragmented meditation on how we pay attention to things, and how language can get in the way. It begins with sound: noises moving through ground, walls and water, as if words themselves have to travel through something dense before they reach us. Then a fish appears, a hole cut in wood, a fish in birch. The speaker seems to ask what it means to really see a fish, or even to be one with it, and settles on a careful restraint: the "less doing" that avoids doing "violence to the fish."
The counting of fins feels like a gentle, almost absurd attempt to pin the fish down with numbers, and the poem pulls back from that effort. By the end the speaker is "done," and the mouth or mind is "thick as a thumb, clogged w/ words." The mood is quiet, searching and a little weary. The poem seems to suggest that too much talking blocks the very seeing it hopes for, and "enough" is the only fitting word to end on.