Fish Out of Water
Two goldfish remain. I call them my boys. One by one their companions have abandoned the piscine ranks of my office aquarium, and the two left now swim, each with his own kind of agility—the larger one, graceful with undulating tail and fins; the smaller, quick and joyful, pumping a very short, almost missing tail.
They swim through the night, and each morning I see them safe, much to my delight and need . . . . . . until last Thursday, that is, when I walked into my office and found the larger of the two lying on the green carpet of the floor. Escape appeared impossible, there being only a narrow opening through which I feed them daily.
With burial in mind, I reached down to pick up my darling boy, and his body squirmed between my fingers. He felt dry, and the two parts of his caudal fin, his beautiful two-pronged tail, were matted together. His gills did not move, but he stirred again. I slipped him through the slim opening and he swam—slowly at first.
His matted tail remained so for several minutes, until the two parts broke free of one another as their thirst softened them. By memory of water, he swam, and I was envious of him, of how gladly and unexpectedly he’d gone home, how his body had returned to where he belonged, and how his smaller brother greeted him with curly flips.
Preserving
Peeling, paring, pulsing a purée, my grandma thrust herself into her work,
the ritual of jam and paraffin, gaskets and transparency of glass.
This, as household art, delighted her, this one and only job done every year.
She placed the jars on cellar shelves that bowed. The jars stood straight, perhaps immortal-proud.
And then? they’d stand and then? they’d stand, until one year she failed to add preserves at all,
and then? she died. The jars from other years stayed behind in that dank under-place,
where years beyond I found them in their wait. And there, contamination was complete:
black mold, corrosion, botulism—had infiltrated jars of beans and plums
and many other summer yields of food in jars that once had promised hope for all.
Some jars were oozing out from underneath their lids and some already shattered glass,
exploding ruined seed upon the cracked and coal-dust-covered dark foundation walls.
And so my grandma’s fruits and vegetables were not preserved for immortality,
but still I think of her who tried to put her summer into winter’s family meals,
who filled the jars with sun’s enormous warmth but then forgot to take them off the shelf.
Saying Grace over Leather Britches
Months ago with a needle and thread I strung fresh green beans, hung them up in the pantry closet, where they dangled in the dark. Way back in the Great Depression, when the prohibitive cost of jars for vegetable and fruit preserves was out of reach, the cheapest way to save the life of a bean was through desiccation. My beans stayed in the closet, where they shriveled like earthworms stranded on asphalt.
We’ve all heard the stories of famine when leather shoes and belts were boiled for sustenance. Perhaps the Egyptians thought, when the time was right, Pharaoh’s leather-body unwrapped could be revivified into its old self with a warm bath. Might the earthworm do the same? Or the bean?
Last Tuesday, I pulled the dead green beans (“leather britches”) off the thread, soaked them in a pot of water for a full day, a full night, then boiled them for hours. Sitting before our meal tonight, we thanked the sun god Ra for giving us the bean in summer, Osiris for the bean’s rebirth in winter.
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks, with a fifth appearing in February, 2024. Her book Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry. An excerpt from her chapbook The Last Gun received the COG Poetry Award, judged by A. Van Jordan and subsequently animated (see http://vimeo.com/193842252). Anne is a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.