Pike

Pike

1.  
   Pike, three inches long perfect
   Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
   Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
   They dance on the surface among the flies.

   Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
   Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
   Of submarine delicacy and horror.
   A hundred feet long in their world.

   In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads--
   Gloom of their stillness:
   Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
   Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

   The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
   Not to be changed at this date;
   A life subdued to its instrument;
   The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

   Three we kept behind glass,
   Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
   And four and a half: fed fry to them--
   Suddenly there were two. Finally one

   With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
   And indeed they spare nobody.
   Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
   High and dry and dead in the willow-herb

   One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
   The outside eye stared: as a vice locks
   The same iron in this eye
   Though its film shrank in death.

   A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
   Whose lilies and muscular tench
   Had outlasted every visible stone
   Of the monastery that planted them--

   Stilled legendary depth:
   It was as deep as England. It held
   Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
   That past nightfall I dared not cast

   But silently cast and fished
   With the hair frozen on my head
   For what might move for what eye might move.
   The still splashes on the dark pond,

   Owls hushing the floating woods
   Frail on my ear against the dream
   Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
   That rose slowly towards me, watching.