fish of the day

i walked back from nottinghillgate today,
where there is a surprising number of unpretentious secondhandbookshops
including one with a whole fiftypenceperbookbasement
with thousands of reasonable books to choose from
i got a couple of cookbooks, and a couple of poetry volumes
the second verse i read in the second of which was:



The Fish Museum by Amy Scattergood



Anna first came to the base at Keflavik
as an army machinist.
After the Cold War melted, she moved in

to the Njarovik house
and agreed to oversee its museum,
....[there aren't really dots, i cannot manage indentation]She was paid in flour and coffee.

petrol and light bulbs and plastic.
Every night she dreamt of dead fishermen.
During the day she watched the fishing boats rearrange the harbor

while she unpacked hundreds of examples of salmon.
She mounted stuffed haddock and herring on the walls.
....With her acetylene torch

she reinvented lightning. One day
.....she soldered together an airplane
out of empty aquavit bottles from the government store.

.....Soon she was building engines
with fish bones. With the radial cartilage of a Greenland halibut,
she made a generator flywheel.

Out of a frontal bone from an 18th century Arctic char,
she fashioned a propeller-bolt collar.
As dirty icebergs sailed in and out of the harbor,

she carried boxes of gill filaments
down from the attic and assembled a bone mosaic
.....on her kitchen floor. Amid battery jars

from her favorite Reykjavik store
.....and lithographs of cod drying racks,
she designed clavicle engines and fitted them
[the line break is not clear here]
in lemon sole mounts. The rooms whirred with activity.
Through here baleen curtains pieces of winter
.....swam over the furniture

and floated amid the cavities of her engines.
.....Sometimes she would sit and enjoy it all
while she ate gravlax and islands of thick rye bread
and read Popular Mechanics through an aquavit fog.
At night tears poured from the glaciers
and collected in kettle holes

while the dead fishermen powered their boats
with all her engines. They fished
off the Reykjanes peninsula with lamps made from fire-flies.

.....The bones of their engines clicked
through waters and porpoises, avoiding chunks of drift ice
and crates of lost firewood.

They spread their nets over the horizon
as she drifted in her sleep,
her socks pulled to her knees and her hair

falling over the floor-boards.
They motored between sleeping gulls
and pulled up the fish like little moonlit seeds

from the tesserae of broken ice.
When morning came
there was a bone heap in the middle of the floor

and a fresh trout wrapped in local newspaper.
She thought she saw footprints of ice
in the snow from the open door.

Later she stirred the air with a sheet of cardboard
from a battery packing crate
and the bones righted themselves and whirred.