Mimicking Show of Movement

My impression of aquariums as contained and shaped water started in Boston. Galvanised blue and when you stand back from the whole menagerie, you can’t even see the fish inside. But in Chester, the lights are dimmer, the water not glowing when you walk in and watch the tufted ducks dive in their tank. Some things are the same: children pressing in, sometimes slapping the glass; the fish safe from stubby hands by child-secreted film and clear thickness. My wonder behaves as young as a toddler’s, instinctual as the fluttering of gills.

Children do not recognise the boundaries cutting space, or understand the mooming of fish lips. Why do their aquatic mouths open and close without sound? I still ask the questions of a child that the ordinary person cannot answer. We could make up our own explanation: I could tell them that fish have their own language outside of vocal-chord sound, but I am too shy.

Sightseers catch and nick each other in the transparent tunnel. Many stand, the flow of footfalls a trickle on the electric walkway. Unanimously, we’ve arched our necks and opened our faces to the fish that water-fly over and around like slow commuters. Sharks put on a mimicking show of movement. Standing there, not alone, I wonder where their gaze looks to.

In this water sanctuary, as with all places, my lover wishes for the children to be but shadows and less than whispers. Perhaps he will feel closer to the swimming life around him if there is an absence of his own kind. Three years ago, he was my muse – the kind that you could grasp like water. He was still photos and text. I tried to fit my idea of him into rigid, glass form.

He’s no longer that which I do not know. No – his face is animate – a school of fish before the camera shutter snaps. Bundled up in a black wool coat and ski hat, his eyes blue and full, trying to break with the human swarm. I can reach out and touch his coated roughness, unplanned as it is real. I think of the manta rays while positioned in that crush of people. You wait, wait, and wait for them to present their white undersides. That is when they reveal their faces.

Crystal Anderson recently graduated with a doctoral award in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. She is originally from Texas but now resides in Handforth, England. Her poems have been previously published in Rattlesnake Review, Suisun Valley Review and Convergence.