Nobody in this poem gets a funeral, yet it is obsessed with record-keeping. Nathaniel S. Rounds takes a small, grubby job, a man netting dead goldfish out of a tank, and turns it into a quiet argument about who gets remembered and who only does the remembering.
The title sets the terms. "Book of Numbers" recalls the Bible book of that name, which is known for its counting of people, and the word "Waterlogged" puns on the "dead fish log" the poem later describes: a logbook, soaked, and a tank full of the drowned. So a grand, scriptural idea of the census is applied to common goldfish. The joke is gentle, but it also raises the stakes. If a book of numbers is where souls get counted, what happens to someone nobody counts?
That someone is Dum Dum Pop, who opens the poem "with cracked smile." The name sounds both affectionate ("Pop") and faintly insulting ("Dum Dum"), and the cracked smile makes him look worn and a little broken. I read him as the worker who nets the fish and keeps the log, though the poem never says so outright. The fish are introduced almost like items on a label: "the little algae eaters the common goldfish." With no punctuation, the phrase defines them by usefulness and ordinariness. Then the imagery turns. "Egg white eyes" is a precise, slightly sickening image. The cloudy, opaque eyes are borrowed from the kitchen, as if death had turned the fish into food. The line "descending the spiral staircase" is never explained. It might be a tank ornament, or the twisting fall of a sinking body. Either way, it gives the dead a ceremonial exit, which the poem then undercuts.
Rounds uses repetition the way a tally uses marks. "Dead fish" returns again and again, flat and unadorned. The one real sound-echo comes in "pencil lead on dead fish log," where "lead" and "dead" chime, and it matters later when the lead returns. The log is compared to "a missionary phonograph made of pencil and cardboard," an odd, memorable simile. A phonograph repeats the same message mechanically, and a missionary insists on it, so the comparison suggests a record that preaches its count over and over with scratchy zeal. Then comes a deliberate drop in tone: Dum Dum Pop "shakes fish into waste basket oblivion." A heavy word like "oblivion" is attached to a wastebasket, and the bathos says that the fish are counted but not mourned.
The turn arrives with "But he is accounted for." The pronoun is ambiguous. It most plausibly points to the fish, "Remembered by quantity and value," but for a moment it could mean Dum Dum Pop himself. The next line corrects us: "Unlike Dum Dum Pop." The fish survive as figures in a ledger, while the man who writes them down "lives inside cardboard" and "dies full of lead." Cardboard might be the clipboard, a cardboard box, or both. The lead has shifted from writing tool to something heavy and poisonous, as though a life spent recording had filled him up with the instrument itself.
The form carries the point. The poem is free verse with almost no punctuation, and its only full stop comes after "cardboard." Lines are isolated into single-line stanzas, like entries in a log. Then the ending falls apart: "Or memory engraved in the minds of / Appreciative patrons of / Fish." Each line hangs on the preposition "of," as if the sentence keeps reaching for a person to remember and can only land on the word "Fish." The memorial is thwarted by its own grammar.
The poem matters because it is darkly funny and unsentimental about invisible work. Institutions keep careful figures for what has value, and they overlook the people who keep the figures. By the final line the reader is the only "appreciative patron" Dum Dum Pop has.