Poem On: Day 25

Magikarp (#129)

(with deep apologies to EB)

I caught a very average Magikarp
and summoned him on the bank,
between river and still-warm Pokéball,
his old and new homes.
He didn’t splash.
He hadn’t splashed at all.
He flopped leaden,
like a beachtowel in the dryer,
and gaped. Across his body
the orange scales bulged
like an exotic fruit, and the yellow
fins jutted like the crown of a fruit:
jagged pickets evolved
to fertilize another wave.
His barbels were spotted
with tiny blooms of algae,
and his belly still crackled
with the electricity I’d used
to capture him.
While he intoned his name—
reflexively, like a prisoner
of war—I thought of his mouth,
vast and gawping, like the character
that means mouth, empty
as the Easter tomb.
I looked into his eyes
which were giant as mine
in this bizarre cartoon,
his pupils absent dots
adrift on a white ink pond.
They shifted a little, but not
to focus a psychic attack.
—It was more like
an egg yolk setting
in a hot skillet.
I considered his harmless face,
his massive size,
and then I saw
a movement, whipping
from behind his gills
out to the tips of his fins,
a whipping that threw him
with a thump against a tree,
hard enough to knock a berry loose.
Some other trainer had spent
a Training Machine to teach him
Tackle, and caught again
he threw himself, fleshy
boomerang, fading pro
called back from the minors.
I stared and stared
and the future filled up
the riverbank,
from the checkered picnic blanket
I’d risen from to battle,
to the pocket of the dropped curry-bread,
the pockets of my trainer’s belt,
the monster pocket
of the unhinged ball, until everything
was shiny, shiny, shiny!
And I took him back to train.