Jack Anderson's "The Fish" begins with a confession that never quite arrives. "I want to say that I've phoned you / a dozen times this week" promises a message, but what follows is a list of who picks up: the dog, the parrot, and finally "the imperturbable fish." The poem never says who "you" is or why the calls go to the household's animals. Judging by the text, the person is absent, perhaps gone for good, while the shared home and its creatures carry on. The central idea is that love outlasts the person it was aimed at, and that grief makes the speaker keep reaching for a connection that can only answer in fragments.
The fish are the poem's strangest and best image. Fish cannot answer a phone, yet they "revolved through my ear / like fossils of your tongue." The line works on two levels at once. It describes the sound of an unanswered call, a hollow, swirling noise in the receiver, and it pictures fish circling in an aquarium. "Tongue" holds several meanings: speech, language, perhaps a kiss. Calling those tongues "fossils" suggests something once alive and now stone, a voice kept only as an imprint. The word "imperturbable" adds a dry comedy, since the fish are untroubled by the speaker's longing. That calm makes the loneliness sharper.
The most moving moment is the poem's repetition of this image with one small change. At the end, the fish are "circling / like remembrances of tongues." "Fossils" has become "remembrances," and "your tongue" has become the plural "tongues." The cold, dead word gives way to something warmer and more human, and the single voice widens into shared memory. The poem has not recovered the person, but it has changed how the loss feels.
Between these two appearances of the fish, three parenthetical instructions break in like stage directions: "This is to be recited in those silences which come upon bars…", then on lazy Sunday afternoons, then on a streetcorner at night. Each names a lull, a moment when noise stops "for no apparent reason." These are the gaps in which the speaker's own silence becomes audible, and the poem imagines itself filling them. The images are vivid and odd: "yawns are buckets filling with sunlight," and a bus retreating into "the blurred / sound of old cities rusting under water." The underwater cities quietly echo the aquarium, so the whole poem seems submerged, with sounds arriving muffled and from far away.
The middle section turns from the telephone to the body. "I have returned to inhabit my body / we have inhabited our bodies" shifts from "I" to "we" within two lines, as if recalling the couple were what returns the speaker to physical life. Then comes the slash in "this sheet / your back." The punctuation fuses two things, the bedsheet and the lover's back, so the sheet seems to hold the shape of the person. It is a small, tactile way of showing absence and presence overlapping. The phrase "we have so lived in these rooms" explains the phoning: the rooms are saturated with shared life, so the speaker keeps calling into them.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme. Its music comes from repetition instead: "dog, parrot, fish," "aquarium" twice, "inhabit" three times. The short opening lines sound like ordinary speech, and the isolated "and once" creates a pause before the surprise of the fish. The parentheticals run into long, prose-like sentences that contrast with this clipped delivery. The final parenthesis is the shortest and quietest: "(This is to be recited slowly / and with care.)" Where the others say when to speak, this one says how. After the comedy and strangeness, the instruction is plain and tender.
The poem is significant for how much feeling it gets from so little explanation. It never says what happened, and it does not need to. A dog, a parrot and some fish carry the weight of the loss, and the poem treats them with a mix of humor and sorrow that feels true to how grief behaves in everyday life. Its last instruction also turns the poem into a kind of ritual, something to be handed on and spoken gently into the next silence.