IT WAS A BOOK called The Fishes.
I think the author was “Url Lanham.” A discursive book, with fuzzy black-and-white pictures, for children around thirteen or fourteen years old, about the history of fishes. I was in my twenties when I found it, in a bookstore on West Broadway in Vancouver, in a bin in front of the store, only one copy, either remaindered or damaged, I think. I thought that children at about fourteen, in the throes of puberty, should know about the history of fishes. It seemed directly to have to do with puberty. The only quote I still have from it is in a poem in Search Procedures called “The Life of St. Teresa.” The quote: “Even if we could have been on the scene when the fishes developed lungs, we could scarcely have predicted the ultimate significance of the invention.” I must still have had the book when I wrote the poem, but it’s lost now. I lost it in 1995 when I lost a lot of things. Why fishes? I guess because of being asthmatic, I’ve often thought of the lungs as not very useful an invention. Only later I understood why lungs are so problematic: if you could spread them all out flat, they’d have more surface than the skin. But why get into that. I can still remember the book’s pale green cover. I miss it. No one I knew was ever interested in reading it, or even listening to me talk about it, and I’ve been talking about it for twenty years now. I wonder where it got to. It was pretty scuffy. “The ancient and heavy fishes.” All I know is that when you come home on a hot day and fill the kitchen sink with cold water and bury your head in it, the only noise you can still hear is what comes from inside; you know you’re an organism then. And when you straighten back up to breathe, the water runs off your face in sheets of cold and streams right down your arms.