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7/18/2022 0 Comments Listening to Fish I'm excited to be returning next month to Bonaire, an island I haven't visited in over twenty years. I'll be carrying along my new bible, Ned & Anna DeLoach's Reef Fish Behavior, a companion volume to the great set of fish, coral, and creature identification guides Ned DeLoach put together with the brilliant Paul Humann. There isn't much these people haven't seen, and photographed, underwater. The cover shot of this volume captures Butter Hamlets in a spawning clasp.
Much of the work that went into Reef Fish Behavior was conducted in Bonaire's waters, which have been protected as a marine reserve for over four decades. In that reserve, I'll be doing field work (diving, writing, photographing) for a project long in the works, a hybrid collection of poetry and prose called Listening to Fish. The idea is to listen closely to what fish and corals and reef creatures have to tell us about their imperiled environments. In particular, I'll be thinking about the health of the reefs today compared to what I recall from when I first began diving in the 1970s, when dropping down on a reef was like entering a psychedelic circus. Now, of course, many of the world’s reefs are desolate graveyards. I’m hoping conditions in Bonaire aren’t quite so bleak. And I hope whatever work I do can contribute to the preservation and restoration of what remains. In the new collection, I’ll be including “Night Dive,” which originally appeared in the Tule Review back in 2015 (or thereabouts), and then in my book. I think its octopus will fit right in with the other creature encounters, and I hope I meet some of her grandchildren. Night Dive Once on a moonless night I lost my companions. Their beams were bright but I’d edged over an outcropping into darkness and touched down softly on a rubble ledge where the wall pulsed with half-hidden forms, eyes on the ends of stalks, spiny feelers testing the current, feather dusters vanishing in a blink, spaghetti worms retracting. So sadly familiar-- things I desire withdrawing, their forms disappearing the instant I extend a hand. The reef folding into itself like a fist. Then, from the stacks of plate coral, the arm of an octopus slid, and another, two more, reaching for my fingertips, my palm. The soft sack of the octopus followed, inching nearer, her tentacles assessing the flesh of my wrist, my arm. My heart pounding. Turquoise pink explosions rushing across the octopus’s form. At my armpit, she tucked in, sliding her arms around my neck and shoulder, her skin becoming the blue and yellow of my dive skin. She stayed with me such a short time, her eyes, those narrow slits, heavy with trust, and my breath so calm, so easy. Above, my companions banged on their tanks, summoning me to ascend. How we worry when one slides over a ledge. How urgently we admonish the lost ones to turn back.
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 Honored to have work up at The Antonym: Bridge to Global Literature, and thrilled for another of the Parentheticals series to appear, this one "Parentheticals V: Nothing About Nothing." Many thanks to the editorial team, and especially to Bishnupriya Chowdhuri.
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