A wren sings, a stone turns over in a field, a stream slips under a hill. Dave Bonta's poem is built from things coming up out of the dark, and it keeps asking what a poet should do about them. It begins with a small lightening. Watching a wren dance on a wall at sunrise, the speaker feels "the heaviness in my chest" lift "like a field stone flipped by the plow." Then comes a blunt claim: "This world was never a text."
That sentence is the knot of the poem, because almost everything around it is soaked in the language of writing. The stone shows an "unmarked cheek." The hunters "left no record." Corn is the "product of 8,000 years / of continuous editing," and the speaker finally returns "to the blank page." So the poem argues with itself. The world isn't a text, yet people keep revising it by plowing, carving, planting and, less innocently, by writing poems. Farming comes out as a kind of authorship, one that feeds people and answers to the seasons rather than to the page.
The poem is wary of its own trade. "I think of this whenever / the sky in a poem shivers under the knife / of a wing," the speaker says, and the next line cuts deeper: "Some hide is forever being flensed." Judging by what follows, the skinning image slides into stone-working, as "practiced fingers" "pull & sever a slick fish-shape from / the mother of flint." On this reading, making a metaphor is like making an arrowhead, because something has to be cut away from its source. A poet's tidy image of a sky and a wing looks faintly violent beside the cave and the field.
Water holds the poem together. The wren's song "bubbles up," arrowheads "swim to the surface," the underground stream "briefly exposes itself to view," and the cave ends in a "final gurgle." Even the ridges are "sinuous swimmers." The landscape becomes a sea in which everything old is rising, which prepares for the title's fish under the mountain. The planting scene near the end, with a fish buried beneath a hill so that squash, beans and corn can "sing their names into memory," makes the point most strongly. Here memory is something grown and eaten, not written down. The corn kernels even echo the fish: "the pattern of scales replicated in the grain."
The form suits this. There are no stanza breaks, no rhyme and no regular meter, only one long block that moves like the stream it describes. Enjambment does much of the work. "The wren's song bubbles / up from his feet" lets the line itself rise. In the cave passage the sentence stretches as the speaker goes "farther & farther over until you're down / on all fours," so the syntax and the body sink together, and the shift into "you" pulls the reader down too. The ampersands give everything a quick, handwritten feel, as if the poem were being jotted down on the walk.
The view from the ridge adds a modern note. The sun glances "off the windshields of trucks / in the quarry beyond," lighting their "plumes of yellow dust." The poem doesn't scold the quarry. It lets the glitter on the river and the glitter on the glass sit side by side. It also admits that the view is temporary, since in six weeks or so leaves will hide it, just as a field is written over each season.
The ending turns from reading to doing. "I too used to garden that way, / & could again" is modest and conditional, but it is the poem's real answer to the blank page. The last three sentences are short and clipped after all those long, winding ones: "It's spring. The first / mayflies are rising. Something leaps." The poem never says what leaps, and my guess is that it could be a fish, or the speaker's lifted heart, or the poem itself getting out of the way. That openness is much of what makes the poem worth reading. It is a nature poem that distrusts its own metaphors, and it ends by pointing past language to the living world it has been trying to describe.