Bob The Goldfish
Like a peaceful warrior, your stance was like a dance
Dark finned, dolphin souled, a player and rambler
Taking the high road, actually there were no roads
Across the lawless lands of your prism like planet
Only your fluidity mastering currents of a godless filter
I too once slept beside a plastic bush, hiding from the world
Coddling my cold blooded heart in the inorganic never talking
Reflections that pantomimed my every move. Of course it’s worse
When you’re human. They’ll call you a big fish in a small pond
Instead of at the helm in your bowl of wild enchanted sea
Oh, Bob, let’s face it. We were very much alike. We breathed
Fecal air and tried to hump the glass at night. You once said
Impenetrable transparency is a marriage just waiting to happen
While looking so cool, blowing your smokeless smoke fish rings
It only now occurs to me we were always gasping for the same air
| Garth Pavell |
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levelheaded: Bob The Goldfish
The paradoxes presented in the first line of Garth Pavell’s “Bob The Goldfish” guide our reading of the entire poem. Mirroring how Bob’s “stance was like a dance,” the poem is solid, yet fluid; serious, yet playful. Its visual layout, born of 15 lines of nearly the same length broken into three five-line stanzas, says walls. The enjambment of all the lines says water.
Similarly, Pavell’s grandiose descriptions of the life of a goldfish work in a couple of ways. On one fin, they’re hilarious (“Across the lawless lands of your prism like planet / Only your fluidity mastering currents of a godless filter”—Come on!). On the other, when we consider the assertion that the speaker and his pet “were very much alike,” all these details can aptly characterize the serious condition of being human. The “lawless,” “godless” planet ain’t so funny now, is it?
Pavell is the kind of poet who doesn’t sprinkle too much or too little into the tank. After a stanza of elaborating on fish life, he links it to the speaker’s and—by extension—to ours. The strange, passing statement, “I too once slept beside a plastic bush,” welcomes numerous interpretations. Did this guy pass out in a dentist’s office, or, figuratively speaking, did he sleep beside something that seemed unnatural? Here’s the great thing about Pavell’s poem. In uncovering the answer to this or any of the other larger questions “Bob The Goldfish” raises, we can stay at the surface or dive deep. Either way, we find something to chew on.
- The Editors
