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JANET BUCK reads "Prize Fish"
In "Prize Fish," the poet asks two questions: "Which aunt is she talking to?" "What is being said on the other end of the phone?" The child's questions are answered by the mother's laughter and the sight of dead fish floating in a bowl. Familial tension in the piece is underscored by the fact (indeed the dry cosmic irony) that the fish come back to life, actually adapt, to dismissal's home.
"Prize Fish" reads like a photograph, a quick glimpse of a child's disinherited sensitivity. In simple terms, a mother who is obsessed with the age-old rite of "cleanliness is godliness," chooses to salt the water ostensibly to control some habitat of potential disease; in a small sense and larger sense as well, her gesture results in the diminishment of a tiny purple passage in her young daughter's life. The fact that the characters speak "two different languages" becomes the seed of a larger issue, which is the mother's minimization of the child's triumph. Perhaps even sadder is the fact that the mother's laughter, the lifting of her own spirit, is done at the expense of her daughter's feelings.
Payne uses images and symbols sparsely enough so that the reader is left (not unlike the goldfish) scrambling to answer questions of purpose and identity. The twist (or proverbial salt in proverbial wound) is deftly delivered in the context of the narrative flow, and not by heavy-handed moralizing: carnal resurrection takes place in a toilet bowl, which further underscores the callous hushing of youth's fragile sense. We are left wishing that the mother were not "flushing away" or poisoning the "possibles" of mother-daughter tetherings.
The goldfish as symbols become the emotive tendrils of the young girl, who is, by virtue of both her youth and her inquisitive nature, ironically going to outlive and blossom well beyond the surroundings of her mother's myopia. Enjambment and plain linguistic precision make this piece the well-framed photo that it is. Payne's frequent use of stanza breaks is another stylistic device that "stretches out" the thread of separateness in terms of dueling visions. At the end of the sixth stanza/couplet, the word "mother" is left dangling on the empty stage of a line without a verb: a sudden, brief, and well-chosen mirror of the mother's emotive detachment.
One usually thinks of a "prize" as an earned reimbursement for achievement. However, I read the "prize" of this poem as the recognition and embracement of renaissance, one that does not depend upon human laws of selfishness, cultural ritual, nor even rhetorical comprehension. Poet, reader, and child (all one) are reduced to an intuitive state that rules. Payne is to be congratulated for her swift, deft kicks in the groin of universal grief. We are "taught" compassion by lack thereof.
previously published on poetryrepairs 01.01:001
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