a cormorant (slight return)

Oops! I forgot this one:

A Cormorant

Here before me, snake-head.

My waders weigh seven pounds.

My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary

For its pockets, is proof

Against the sky at my back. My bag

Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough

For a year in the Pleistocene.

My hat, of use only

If this May relapses into March,

Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,

Optimistic, awkward, infatuated

With every twig-snag and fence-barb

Will slowly ruin the day. I paddle

Precariously on slimed shale,

And infiltrate twenty yards

Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam

Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic

Of the river’s tunnel, and pray

With futuristic, archaic under-breath

So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,

Will attach its incomprehension

To the bauble I offer to space in general.

The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,

Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.

He’s thinking: “Will that stump

Stay a stump just while I dive?” He dives.

He sheds everything from his tail end

Except fish-action, becomes fish,

Disappears from bird,

Dissolving himself

Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally

Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,

Himself as he was, and escapes me.

Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,

A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.

(Ted Hughes from A River, 1983)