Goldie

The footlong goldfish belonged to a fashion designer who died last year of an aneurysm                    now it swims in our thousand gallon metal pond in the dark                       solitary as it ever was but in cleaner water                  after three weeks it still hasn’t come to the surface to eat                it swims in the middle depth gold glimmer swishing elegantly through greenish water               ignores aquatic floating plants        fledgling lily pads inches beneath the surface                too deep for the right amount of light                   colored pinches of flakes I drop to entice it simply float and disintegrate                  contribute organic matter to the dance of pH                     I tell Rosemerry the fashion designer’s young granddaughters told me the fish’s name is Goldie                     I scoff at the awful cliché of it                   she says We had a fish named Goldie once!                of course you did I laugh                   she pulls up an old video album from 12 years ago                   in which her living son narrates the lives of his two fish, Goldie and Food                       his boyish voice remarks upon their particular talent for searching sparkly blue rocks                   for pausing time to time to look in the mirror which they seem to enjoy                     between clips my friend had slipped in field trip footage of a large aquarium shark                          its teeth jagged and close                   swimming its own tank                   looking back at us through glass                   duhdun duhdun duhdun              spliced in for comic effect                 what boy doesn’t thrill at a shark                 I laugh at her clever production full of post-prescient dread and love               the soundtrack of its life approaching ours