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.