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Aquarium

Chapter 3: Aquarium
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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Aquarium

IF you would view, buy tickets at the door.
Your brain for lucre please! the fishes here
Require some effort on your part, no more,
For comprehension; then the water’s clear
And you will see, dimpling in hyaline
Fish, oval, strange, glitter as rubied wine
In crystal goblets; fish with spotted gills,
Great flower-fish like open daffodils,
Pale fish that float with mellow, morbid eyes,
Dark fish that feed on wings of dragon flies,
Fish fulvid and fugacious, hovering
Amongst the silver cress with carmine wing,
And fish with small reticulated scales
Floundering mazed, with iridescent tails
Diaphanously quivering ...
Mad, necrophilic urchins cleft to trees
Of coral, with a sting as keen as bees
When they would kiss you; fish electrical
And fish with poniards, fierce, inimical,
Red fish that bark like mastiffs at the moon,
Blue limpets, purple jellies, fish that croon
Mauve, melancholy melodies, and fish
To suit your mood, good reader, as you wish!