A big fish slipped through your net!
The ocean is vast,
And having broken its surface to show his scales’ shimmer in a sudden spray of
Water caught in a beam of light,
He breaks the surface again,
Swiftly slipping to depths beyond your grasp,
Carried by unseen currents across the vast and variegated realm where he is king,
Glistering golden-mailed, winding whale-roads riding.
A big fish slipped through your net!
Do you even know?
Your net was too narrow to compass him round;
But some with sardines and other small-fry
Are sated instead,
Having no hands to hold greater, nor stomach to digest it.
A big fish slipped through your net;
But what of the story you’ll tell at the market?
And who would hear it,
Compassed round by reek of rotten fish-mongers,
Bellowing of deaf barmaids,
And roiling gray waves of shabby peasants shuffling, stall to stall,
Shambling swine snout-led to troughs of stale slop.
A big fish slipped through your net.
Nor knot nor noose would bind him,
No hook would tempt nor harpoon fix him,
But swiftly he slipped them all,
Silent to silence devolving.
But even as the eternal waves wash his ripples from the water’s face –
Egress effortless erased –
An echo comes from afar,
A high air sung by sea-faring folk,
Deft-handed diviners of deep and unseen ways:
“The world is always full of the sound of waves.
“The little fishes, abandoning themselves to the waves, dance and sing and play,
“But who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows its depth?”
A big fish slipped through your net.
Who, me?
Nah, nah.
I’m jes
chillin, sittin here ponderin my
orb and whatnot:
So to say.
Or, better, I’m just sitting here having a conversation with my instrument, the song I’m playing, and the tradition I was handed, last and least in line in the ultramarine ultramarathon –
face to face, knee to knee, heart to heart.
No room to slip a strange word in edge-wise, be it sharp or dull: thicker than thieves,
dontcha know, and the lope of our cant’s lilt is too light for plodding pack-mules’ tongues to bear.
Or, as it’s said among the civilized:
Tahmineh Shaahsavaari Let’s Em Know What’s Up
Until another day.
4 October 2026
