Classic Poem

I am not sure, even now, what troubled me
about the eels. Fifty years ago, I was forced
to leave a whaling village whose saltbox houses
shored against the salt-hay fields
in bleached, frigid, miserable emptiness...
the wavering line of dunes, the swollen river, the blank ocean.
In the dim corridor of the shingled wharf,
the light caught, refracted by dusty panes,
watery troughs lifting the catch of thin-shelled steamers;
gladiatorial lobsters, their lumpish claws pinned
by wooden wedges; mussels the forbidden indigo
of twilight. From the sweatered neck of a clam
jetted forth a stinging, whispery stream
of salt water, baptising me in the eye.

I was still a stranger to Venice then.
The first time I viewed that floating world,
the Grand Canal was plumed in frozen mist,
a curtain of fog aslant the corrugated waters,
as if closing on an old, rarely applauded play.
Across from the flaking bandbox of Ca' d'Oro,
the fishmongers had just opened their stalls.
The market's columns, squatter than the common
Palladian orders, were carved no later
than my father's father's time. The past
makes its small homages, as it must,
even in such a capriccio of the Jazz Age,
the stone capitals elaborately chiseled
into the hulls of wherries, grimacing visages
of octopus and squid, agreeable monsters of the lagoon,
guardians to protect the salty turns of commerce.

I smelled then the old desire. The salty stink,
the nearness of the ocean's flesh, filled me
with an abiding — I am not ashamed to admit —
nostalgia for it , the unnamed and unreachable it ,
the it of those early voiceless scenes. What ransoms
must they require, childhood and its losses?
Having sought them in the fish markets
of Istanbul and Paris, I waited for that slightly foul,
antiquated odor to return me again
to those seeping reliquaries, so that once more
I might enter Paradise.
That morning, all came to view:
the placid tuna hacked into agate slabs;
the warty, demonic bottom fish slumped in mortal piles,
an upended crab flailing a stiffened claw.
Off to one side, in a stainless steel tray, for sale
like the rest, like glistening bejeweled intestines,
lay man's first great tempter and antagonist,
the serpent. Of course these weren't serpents
lying dead before me, merely common eels,
mud-feeders, greasy, tough as rawhide,
a nature morte fetched by some jobbing
Sienese painter. Just beyond the tray
lay the glinting knife, the pile of skinned
and eviscerated carcasses, even the rough skins,
like Michelangelo's oily, sloughed-off rag
held up in the Sistine Chapel. Silence
rose from the blood-smeared block,
where all had grown still. Then one of the bodies
slid against its neighbor, and all gruesomely turned
together, like the terrible gears of a clock.

Recalling this now, I am not sure I have caught
their sad composure, their curious complaisance,
as if they had suffered all this before,
though even worse than the dying was the watching.