Five words in, and we are already looking through glass. "fish gazing at fish" has no finished verb, no capital letter and no full stop, just a stare held in place. The title does the rest of the scene-setting: a small, round, transparent world where everyone can see everyone and nobody can leave. Oddly, the line never says the fish see *each other*. They gaze at fish, which might mean their neighbours, their own reflections bent by the curve of the bowl, or the creatures watching from outside. The looking is intense, but what is being looked at stays slippery.
The next line turns that slipperiness into a question: "who are absent? who present?" The grammar enacts the problem. The first question has its verb, "are", and the second loses it, so "present" is left hanging with nothing to anchor it, as if presence were literally missing a word. The questions also receive no answer. Looking cannot settle them, because being in the same water is not the same as being together. A gaze can pass straight through a person and touch nothing.
Then the poem makes its leap, and it does so without any "like" or "as." After the white space we are suddenly among people: "how unhappily a man may fall / into bribing people with drink / to be with him." The reader has to build the bridge between fish and man alone. "how" has the swing of an exclamation, but there is no exclamation mark, so the tone is quiet and rueful. "unhappily" can be read two ways: the man falls in an unhappy manner, or it is simply sad that a man *may* fall at all. The modal "may" matters too. This is not a confession about one particular person. It is a possibility that hangs over anyone, the reader included. And "fall" quietly keeps the water imagery going, since one falls *into* a habit the way one falls into a bowl or a pond.
The blunt word is "bribing." The poet could have chosen "inviting" or "treating," which would have kept some dignity. "Bribing" admits the transaction. The preposition "with" appears twice, and the two uses expose the whole sadness: "with drink" is the tool, "with him" is the hoped-for result. The poem never names a bar, but drink and a crowd suggest one, which would make it another glass-walled space where people can be seen and yet not reached. Now the earlier question gets a partial answer. The people who accept the drinks are present in body, but their attention has been purchased, which makes them absent in the way that counts. The man is surrounded and still unaccompanied.
The shape of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, and the only echoes are plain repetitions: "fish" twice, "with" twice. Repetition without development is a fitting sound for a poem about circling in the same small space. The lines also taper in a way that is easy to miss. Counting syllables, they run roughly five, seven, nine, eight, and then four. After the long, almost syllogistic sentence about falling and bribing, the last line, "to be with him," drops short, like a voice trailing off or a body landing. It ends on "him," a pronoun with no name, and there is no full stop to close the poem. The sentence just stops, like the man's hope.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to do. It does not lecture about loneliness or pass judgement on the drinker. The word "unhappily" leans towards pity, not scorn. It sets one exact image beside one unadorned remark and trusts the reader to see that they are the same thing. It also leaves behind a more uncomfortable thought: in any crowded room, any of us might be the fish staring at the glass, or the one paying for the company.