Life with Fish by Henry Stimpson

Life with Fish

1.
Struck mute, my father points
his thumb to his parched mouth,
takes one sip of apple juice, gags
and coughs, sweat beading his face.
I feel awful, but then
he reaches for Suzanne’s hand.
“We love you!” I say. He nods off
in his reclining wheelchair.

2.
A social worker disguised as the mailman
was spying on him, Dad muttered.
He slammed the salt shaker on his plate,
shattering it, then skulked into the basement
to hone his hunting knives
on his whining power grindstone.
My supper turned to ashes. I was eleven.

After more breakdowns and shock treatments,
Dad was too fragile to keep a job for long
but still fished for bass, scup, tautog,
bluefish, flounder, trout and perch
he fileted expertly, dusted in cornmeal
and pan-fried to golden succulence.

3.
Handsome and poker-faced at 29,
Dad holds up a mottled gray-black tautog
with one hand and with the other
cradles me and his lethal speargun.
Forever six in my striped T-shirt,
I’m thrilled to be with him.

4.
Seventeen years later in the same tiny kitchen,
Dad, balding and mustached,
and I, bearded, with a dark curly nimbus,
grin showing off two fierce big bluefish.

He’s 83, a widower.
I anxiously shadow him
as he hops goat-like across boulders
to a fishing ledge above the sea.
No fish for the camera that day.

5.
I wheel my bony dad
out into the chill winter sun
and soon roll him back inside
by the tropical fish tank, his theater
in the nursing home. The cast includes
a small slow urchin, a shy red shrimp,
and “the boss,” a beaky fluorescent-yellow tang
that chases off the darting blue damsels
and made him chuckle.

He’s 93 today. He’s still asleep,
so I tuck in next to him a birthday card
with a popup trout and a joke
about its exaggerated size.

Two hours later they call me.
Now I’m a fish out of water.

*

Henry Stimpson’s poems have appeared in many publications, including Poet Lore, Rolling Stone, Lighten Up Online, Atlanta Review, Delmarva Review, On the Seawall, Scientific American (forthcoming) and others. A diehard Boston Celtics fan, he lives in Eastern Massachusetts and also writes essays and humor. Stimpson is a semi-retired public relations practitioner and a longtime volunteer ESOL tutor, currently helping a fine Moldovan man speak English better.