Re: The Friendly Fisherman
by
pelirojo viejo
07/17/2008, 4:52 PM
I like this. The images are simple but the ideas are rich. To represent the life of a relationship as a fish caught from the sea is to flirt with cliché, but this is not one.
I like the idea of the fish (girl?) sunned by familiarity. It's an interesting contradiction that a fish would find the sunny deck of a boat familiar. Familiar because she has been pulled from the lake before?
The last verse is excellent. The idea that death will come soon can be read in various ways, and all of them work. Soon the relationship will die. Soon the actual person will die, perhaps due to illness or age. Soon we all will die, our time alive being so relatively short. I tend to read it as the impending death of a relationship, because the fish took a sweet bait, and a leap, and yielded to briskness and purposefulness. But any way I choose to read it, we are still "gasping for minutes/built from every second." To me the idea that seconds represent minutes for the gasping fish on the boat deck is about how when we realize our ephemeral nature we struggle to extend time through experience.
That's nice.
One nit: I do think the title is odd. It relieves my fear that all of this brisk and purposeful lack of sportsmanship might have a dark aspect to it, but it also sounds like the name of a seafood restaurant.