What is an eel? Perhaps two tridents
and a sharp corner, or backing out
and around two cul-de-sacs, then driving
straight down the road ahead. Eel, noun. Snakelike
fish, proverbial for its slipperiness.
An eel is an ode to bonelessness, though
a hundred vertebrae beg to differ.
To scalelessness, though they come large and fanged
to small and meek, pale and opalescent
to blotchy, spotted, ribboned with color.
We ignore them, glassed in, wriggling their brief
lives, though some live twenty years. We assume
they will still be there, attending to eel
matters—eat, swim, hide, mate—when we are done
burying our dead, when the lights switch on
again in the aquarium. Look, son,
eels! we will say, the boy maybe glancing
up from his phone to see blue-hued caustics
over the long fingers of eel bodies
crooking out of sand, just a brief pitstop
on our walk between the sharks and penguins.
An eel knows what it knows, yet we cannot
bear to count ourselves out of it, jailers
needing love from our inmates, plague be damned.
From their side of the glass, our lives are brief,
ebbing ripples. We are the lonely ones.
Sumida Aquarium
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