The Fish Swims Under the Mountain of the World — Summary

Sunrise, & the wren’s song bubbles up from his feet. He dances on the wall as the ridge turns crimson. Watching from the window, I feel the heaviness in my chest lifting like a field stone flipped by the plow, turning its unmarked cheek toward the harrow. This world was never a text. With the spring plowing, arrowheads swim to the surface of the field adjoining the large sinkhole down in the valley where an underground stream briefly exposes itself to view. You can follow it back under the bedrock in growing darkness, hunching farther & farther over until you’re down on all fours & the water meets the ceiling with a final gurgle. I think of this whenever the sky in a poem shivers under the knife of a wing. Some hide is forever being flensed. Practiced fingers turn the outside in, or pull & sever a slick fish-shape from the mother of flint. What flesh did those stone points seek, so near the valley’s own gullet? The hunters left no record on the cave walls that hundred-year floods wouldn’t have erased, but elsewhere, a few pecked images remain: dream creatures carved on riverside cliffs, or on the spines of ridges hundreds of miles long, these sinuous swimmers. Yesterday morning, I walked the ridge crest as far as the gap & stood watching the sun shimmering on the river & glancing off the windshields of trucks in the quarry beyond, back-lighting their plumes of yellow dust. In a month & a half, this view will vanish behind a screen of leaves, & by midsummer, the field next to the cave will be thick with the rustle of corn, product of 8,000 years of continuous editing. I come home to the blank page with my gaze full of distances, thinking of a fish buried under a hill so the Three Sisters – Squash & Beans & Corn – can sing their names into memory another year, the pattern of scales replicated in the grain. I too used to garden that way, & could again. It’s spring. The first mayflies are rising. Something leaps.