Fish Poem by Leonard Kress

Why does everything come back to fish?
The time of year when the Maumee River
is flush with human jetties, casters, waist-deep
in the chill, arms like pistons, their manic Spring quest
for Walleye insatiable. They won't be served
for dinner, though- fear of poisoning their young.

Turn to the musings of Carl Jung
to make sense of synchronicity, his take on fish,
beginning with a human-aquatic figure that served
as an ancient alchemical inscription. How on the river
bank he encountered a giant creature in its quest
to reach water, only to disappear in the deep.

How that same day, he saw a patient, in deep
despair, recount terrifying dreams she had as a young
girl, and how her whole adult life had become a quest
to make sense of those giant nightmare fish
that continued to haunt her. Later, at a cafe on the river,
he savoured freshly caught rainbow trout served

by a waiter named Fischel. In dreams, the archetype serves
as stand-in for libido or greed; or if it's deep
in the sea- unconscious urges; if it leaps out of a river
then fright or redemption. When I was young,
hard as I tried, I was never able to hook a fish.
Though I did set out on various quests,

or set forth (into the dark wood) to use the language of quest,
to find the exact cause I was meant to serve.
I knew of the Grail and the aged, wounded Fisher
King from Jessie Weston's Ritual to Romance, I was deep
in The Psychology of Transference by Jung.
I kept my implacable sense that this river

(and all rivers like it) was the River
separating the living from the dead, the quest-
ioner from the question, and that while I was young,
I had to dive in, for everything's a matter of serving
or being served. And how to approach the deep
recessed pools of the incorporeal, commanding fish.