Like a Catfish Out of Water

Discovering a new (old) poet is always a good thing. For me, it often happens via subscriptions to “poems of the day.” A week or so back, a poem called “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump” by David Bottoms surfaced in my inbox.  If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a poem with an unusual subject, and this was one of them.

After enjoying the rat poem, I purchased Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) by Bottoms. In the first section, from his first book, I found another poem that delivered. So simple, straightforward, and unusual. Here you go:

 

The Catfish by David Bottoms

From a traffic jam on St. Simons bridg

I watched a fisherman break down his rod,

take bait-bucket in hand, and throw

to the pavement a catfish too small to keep.

As he walked to his car at the end of the bridge,

the fish jumped like a crippled frog, stopped

and sucked hard, straining to gill air.

Mud gathered on the belly. Sun dried the scaleless back.

 

I took a beach towel from the back seat

and opened the car door, walked to the curb

where the catfish swimming on the sidewalk

lay like a document on evolution.

I picked it up in the towel

and watched the quiver of its pre-crawling,

felt whiskers groping in the darkness of the alien light

then threw it high above the concrete railing

back to the current of our breathable past.

 

So much to admire here, but I’ll point out what attracted my attention especially. The similes, for one: “…the fish jumped like a crippled frog,” “…the catfish swimming on the sidewalk/lay like a document on evolution.”

Then there’s how the fish “sucked hard, straining to gill air” and how the speaker “watched the quiver of its pre-crawling,/felt whiskers groping in the darkness of the alien light.”

Last lines are all-important, and here Bottoms nails the landing as the speaker “threw it high above the concrete railing/back to the current of our breathable past.”

Short, compact, dense. Only a few bites but rich in calories, in other words. A great poem to model your work after, in other words.