An ancient perch has caught

my eye. He lies

intact. His scales, size of a man’s

thumbnails, seem to weigh

nothing             

against its all-

too-many possibilities. Inside him

(if you can make your-

self small) you’ll find a hall

so huge, dead gods

must come alive

just to pass through it. I want

to pass through it—and I could

let the vast

sleeve of him swallow up

my arm in silver chain mail once alive, only

there is glass between us.     

It is scratched, dusty,

smudged. The light

is dim; the air    

uncirculated. After all,

however skillfully embalmed   

an emblem of his kind, he is not

the main attraction:      

many gold ornaments—exhumed

from a famous pharaoh’s tomb—

dwell famously

just two halls down . . . Imagine

how sparse that royal after-

life is now—no gem-encrusted throne

to host his vantage, no renderings

of slack-tongued cows to stay      

his hunger, nor tiny boat

to ferry him, his age-old teenage bones,

across that memoryless realm of goings-forth

(all so we might meet

these treasures meant

only to be regarded by the dead). But remember, we are here

for the perch, who is himself

two thousand years and long carved free

of a dense pale flesh

you just might know

the taste of—I do

and don’t. Since each perch tastes, as you’d imagine,

of his given river and his prey,

also whatever age he managed

to drift through. And though

I’ve stood and stared

into the archaic blue   

that snakes along outside, its violent moods

now tamed by monumental

dams that kiss

both Aswan and Sudan,

I know there is no seeing

to the bottom

the perch swam along, perhaps feeling

quite safe as his long form divided

the Nile, however briefly, from itself,

as his fleet pearly belly glided close

to the fertile soil that world above

relied on for its crops—you know them well:

barley, lentil, flax, the fleshy figs,

even the thousand starlike bursting heads

of sacred reeds—as his dorsal fins

stirred the elements,

the river and its bed blurring

into each other almost tenderly

at his swaying command. Even when he surfaced,

if he did, his gold-rimmed eyes

would hardly have admired

the dry, bright heights of Thebes,

its columns standing

in ageless mimicry

of blossoming papyri. Surely,

he didn’t linger there,

but plunged back down,

where only his kind could be schooled

in the value of his flesh, let the dark

embankments take their place

as his home’s high walls. All

of this was likely finer to him

than the finest paintings

of goddess Nut, her stunning body stretched over a night

sky buried in trick passages  

underground, a firmament

that hoped not to be found. Who knows

what the perch thought

of the night versus

the day, what repertoire

of threats emerged, only

to, songlike, die away, or what

feats of flight his body published

in those sparkling waters, as he established

so large an existence

in the depths, in the monumental

moment of his life. And though

he now is laid out unavoidably

as artifact, only his lack

of decay seems by design—all else,

if ordered or if artificed, was by a mind

I cannot claim to know . . .

Unlike in that other poem

you might know, there is no saving

the perch, no freeing him

from the fate of being caught

behind glass. No chance of giving

the brittle topographies of his gills

or the frail fans of his fins back

to a river that holds

no memory of nourishing him. His interior—

I’ll refrain

from saying “innards,” since he is more

hollow than not—

defies all logic, more

geologic in aspect than many rocks

that I have met (in these

my less-than-hallowed

three decades and a half).

And from the brief

vantage I have called my life,

I bend down toward him, craving

some grain of purchase on his age-

old Piscean view, staring as I do

into the lusterless sunken

coin that was his eye.

A fish eye, yes, it calls to mind

the type of lens that bends

the world so amorously toward it

space itself will warp

just to be held. See

the dark disc shift

in its shallow

socket two millennia ago: The perch,

not yet a captive

curio, slowly grows

large and bold and finally

curious. Now

he is glimpsing the end

of his hunger, not knowing

how long the end can last, but perhaps

registering a vague form

of freedom

descending, glinting

delicious as it angles

down, dangling

both before him and within him—

inverted, fetal, bright—

tasted by his flat-earth eye

before his mouth fills up

with its own

cold blood. Strange,

he seems to me

plated even now,

proffered to our view, as is so much

in this salmon-hued

museum full of sand-

strewn skylights. (All

of this, recall, was actually designed

by a French architect

who failed to bear

the Sahara’s restless

surface in mind.) No

matter. Up river,

or even down, a line

must be snapping even now,

emitting a single note

clean as a lute’s cut string,

and a fish swims off

in a tarnished flash, fleeing

the magnetic scent

of newfound pain,

while our perch keeps on

emulating sleep, along

with several other leathern lives

shelved behind this their filthy

length of glass. (Glass, I am

told, lacks “long-

range order,” moving invisibly down-

ward, a solid matter longing

to be water.) A little stiff,

I have to shift my weight now,

also my eyes

from the bony perciform network of his skull—

its shifty structure free of the bizarre

articulations zippering my skull’s plates—

down to his hindmost fins.

They look like that paper

meat comes wrapped in or pioneers

once covered windows with in place

of glass. I laugh

and lift my tongue’s own

dorsal part, as if to ask, “God,

who will ever touch,

with lotus blossom and with myrrh,

the place in us where such huge

appetites once took place?”

True, the perch’s beauty

might be called invasive, least

endangered and yet most

so by human hands

and water hyacinths

(also invasive, as it turns out).

No matter. Whoever,

I imagine, staved off their hunger

with the perch’s heft, whoever saved

his dulled metallic skin and now-

browned bones, swabbed his skin

in the appointed unguents,

as if his body were one open

wound, whoever

gently wound him up

in linen strips

the centuries would strip away,

bound him neatly

in reeds (not picked to write

poems or decrees), did they mean

for us to see him or

was the idea that he too would pass

into an eternity

where only our hungers survive

us? Where his ghost could feed

the ghost of some young pharaoh

finally impoverished,

immortal, free? It harrows me to weigh

the possibilities, the way

his body must have flashed almost synaptic

in that liquid rage

of void, his movements indivisible

from what he felt. The glass, too,

continues to concern me—

smudged as it is

with what seem great efforts

to reach through it. Why won’t the museum

do something—clean it up, swap it out

with a pane less easily marked?

Then again, there are so many hours

when the perch’s legibility matters not         

at all, at night, say,

when the halls are purged

of pilgrimage and language,

and the shadows, crouched

under their given

artifacts, begin to bloom

outward till they touch

and mix and stunningly displace

the artifice of daylight, all at once

emptying the displays

of contrast. Even the walls

most rapturous with history

must then be wrapped in that sensual

atmosphere of infinite negation . . .

The perch, though, he is not

concerned. His body holds its shape

while I behold

it however awkwardly, raising

and lowering my head, bobbing

as if in place to catch the best

glimpse of his naked,

nacre-like immensity: the slippery

syntax of his rearmost blushing scales;

his skin, thin as the gilt

fussily dabbed on an antique

page’s edge; then come the splayed

blades of his ribs; the belly

hollow as a harp, yet full

of that ilk of emptiness

all music requires to live . . .

But now I am caught

off guard by a woman’s finger

prying deeply into me, my back. How long

have I been blocking

her view? Her gesture throws me

off-balance: I throw a hand

against the intervening plate

of glass, adding to it

my own unholy oils. Our eyes meet

because our words can’t. And anyway,

hasn’t she already spoken

with the part of her that bends

most readily into a hook—

reminding me the meat

of me cannot stay here? No. Cannot stay

perched between its own

reflection and the gaping

mummy fish that swam in time-

lapse through twenty centuries

of conquest and collapse,

who might in fact have passed,

during flood times, through sand-

stone temples, darting past

the at last moistened eyes

of Isis—all this—just to nourish

a stranger’s desire to see me

disappear. But I don’t want to go.

And only as I resurface to a world

of hours and appropriate

moments we can spend communing

with an arti-

fact whose whole form seems

one dusty scar, do I glance down

at a small white plate, barely legible

through all the glass’s glaring flaws, half

written in my tongue, half

in the more incurvate script

of Arabic: No traces of the original

bandaging remain

from this Nile perch.

And from my imperiled angle,

I read on, to find the perch was not

eaten at all. Not even tasted. No.