An Aquarium poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry

Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,

Silver shiftings,

Rings veering out of rings,

Silver — gold —

Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,

With sharp white bubbles

Shooting and dancing,

Flinging quickly outward.

Nosing the bubbles,

Swallowing them,

Fish.

Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,

The light rippling over them

In steel-bright tremors.

Outspread translucent fins

Flute, fold, and relapse;

The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles

In scarcely tarnished twinklings.

Curving of spotted spines,

Slow up-shifts,

Lazy convolutions:

Then a sudden swift straightening

And darting below:

Oblique grey shadows

Athwart a pale casement.

Roped and curled,

Green man-eating eels

Slumber in undulate rhythms,

With crests laid horizontal on their backs.

Barred fish,

Striped fish,

Uneven disks of fish,

Slip, slide, whirl, turn,

And never touch.

Metallic blue fish,

With fins wide and yellow and swaying

Like Oriental fans,

Hold the sun in their bellies

And glow with light:

Blue brilliance cut by black bars.

An oblong pane of straw-coloured shimmer,

Across it, in a tangent,

A smear of rose, black, silver.

Short twists and upstartings,

Rose-black, in a setting of bubbles:

Sunshine playing between red and black flowers

On a blue and gold lawn.

Shadows and polished surfaces,

Facets of mauve and purple,

A constant modulation of values.

Shaft-shaped,

With green bead eyes;

Thick-nosed,

Heliotrope-coloured;

Swift spots of chrysolite and coral;

In the midst of green, pearl, amethyst irradiations.

Outside,

A willow-tree flickers

With little white jerks,

And long blue waves

Rise steadily beyond the outer islands.

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More poems by Amy Lowell