The sounds that fish make
when no one is listening
in the koi pond, do they mouth
& baise-moué l'ail to the sky
and dream of swimming among the stars?
But in the depths of the ocean,
there's a piscean clack & growl,
the sonic boom and tump of black drumfish
travels up canals through bedroom walls—
their song akin to water-boarding, or a hydraulic engine.
At Strawberry Cove, the first high tide after the full moon,
we'd wait for the grunion run, they'd crawl out of the sea,
the only fish that must be caught by hand.
But the town drunks and Asians gathered them up in buckets
In a bioluminescent sea, we heard shoals of herrings
fart out a Morse code—like an angry army of Jimmy Choos
let loose in Grand Central Station at rush hour.
Those droning toadfish, those heavy metal rockers
sitting by the dock of the bay, no Country Joe & the Fish
singing We don't give a damn, drive Sausalito houseboaters
stark-raving-mad on warm summer nights.
Cusk eels jackhammering in the key of sea,
force sleep-deprived oceanographers inland.
We listened to miked pirañas, castenetting
like SETI radars in the Steinhart Aquarium.
Runaway seahorses, chirping clownfish,
yellow croakers, pistol shrimp, cod & haddock
thrumming up an aquatic din—
fishily belting it out in the name of love.
From Ensenada to Point Lobos
fish are chorusing a grand stadium "wave."
No passive acoustics, they sing the body electric
with a cacophony of barks and grunts
worthy of a Liberian ship engine with thrown rods.
Midshipmen looking for love in all the wrong places,
might have stumped Aristotle and sailors alike.
But no one has ever heard a butterfly fish make a sound.
Merely a whisper and sigh of fin and wing, like rustling leaves.
10/2/2013
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