Hubris

Hunger, or How the Fish Got His Gills

July 12, 2014 /

Claire Bateman To Banner

“Before you were born./Before your mother was born./Before your uncles were born./When fish could slither on the land./Three young men wanted me for a wife./Three young men, and one old fish, a grouper . . .”—By Claire Bateman

Hunger
or
How the Fish Got His Gills
(from a South Pacific legend)

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

Peering out through his glassy eyes to see.
Peering out through his glassy eyes to see.

Claire BatemanGREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/14/2014—

Before you were born.
Before your mother was born.
Before your uncles were born.
When fish could slither on the land.
Three young men wanted me for a wife.
Three young men, and one old fish, a grouper.
Day after day with his thick voice he begged me.
I told him no. He said he could not leave me.
One morning, I saw that he was gone.
I sat on the beach with my red-and-gold cloth, working.
I did not look toward the other side of the inlet.
Sly over the white sand, silent behind me,
slap into the water I was tumbled
all the way down his throat, if fish have throats.

And how I drove him then, that startled lover,
with what speed, what awful undulations,
steering the spindly curve of his white bones,
peering out through his glassy eyes to see
the whole ocean bulging and fixed before me,
his moist thoughts lining the inside of my mouth
like unborn pearls, or little eggs to suck,
I his false heart, the load of his desire,
and o-o-o! was all that he could say
until I tired, and with my sewing shell
I slit him up both sides, and out I swam
through that bloody sluice, my hair an ink cloud
around the roughness of his scaly face.
My people hymned as a goddess then
with oils, corals, garlands, and perfumes.
And from that moment on he only breathed
through his wounds, as lovers always do.

Note: The painting of the grouper, by Delilah, derives from http://paintingoftheday.blogspot.com/2012/02/grouper-painting-demo.html. This poem appears in Bateman’s 1991 collection from Wesleyan University Press, The Bicycle Slow Race.

To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.

Bateman Scape

Bateman Coronology

Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)

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