God and Nature Winter 2024
A Goldfish Sings a Tentative Psalm
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By Anikó Albert
The perfection of the universe is written around me:
bounded yet infinite space.
Light bounces back and forth
reflecting and refracting
in every direction
defining its liquid geometry.
I sway with the perfect cadence of its smooth substance,
I dance with the caressing currents of its fine-tuned laws,
I’m one with its still, self-enclosed beauty.
I lack nothing: colorful manna falls in its appointed time,
Brine shrimp and worms in their seasons.
Down I go to bury my nose in sand,
to lay in cool green glades of leaves.
Up I glide to the shining flat boundary,
where the gate to nothingness is open,
a soft, rippling surface my fin can break without effort.
I play at jumping into it, just for the thrill,
to shudder at the feel of vacuum on my skin,
to feel the sting of emptiness in my gills.
I draw a circle up there, and laugh on my way down
as the nature of things pulls me back where I belong.
On other days, when I feel like it,
I race along the curved boundary,
brushing its closed hard brilliance with my tail,
thinking about its mysteries.
Some say those images on it are illusions,
tricks of the light as its rays hit our eyes,
paradoxes we can expect at the edges of reality.
Some propose that they are our dreams,
perverse projections from our minds,
things to write poems in the sand about but not take too seriously.
But there are those who think the shadows are real:
that there’s a world on the other side,
like ours, but different,
where strange misshapen beings
with clumsy columns for fins and tails
lumber along their illogically curved paths,
obeying a force unknown to us.
Eli the Black stops me on some days
as I make my rounds,
taps an antenna against the boundary,
curls the others into a frown of gravity
and tells me his theory.
The clumsy shadow creatures, he says, are
no myth
or mirage,
but the very reason we’re here.
They’re the creators of our world,
the designers of its beauty,
the refreshers of its substance.
They provide the flakes and the worms,
they remove what’s dirty and bad
and restore goodness.
I like the story. Some days I almost believe it.
But remember the source: Eli is a Shelled One.
They are half strange themselves, aren’t they?
They spend much of their time stuck to the boundary,
Not knowing the beauties the rest of us share in.
They eat dirt,
and crawl around ungracefully
with those heavy burdens on their backs
whenever they’re not hiding those devilish faces they have.
No wonder they like to make up stories.
I smile at Eli,
the light,
the coolness,
and keep swimming.
Anikó Albert grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University. A serial migrant, she taught English as a Foreign Language in her hometown, high-school Spanish in Kingston, Jamaica, and English and various subjects in Alameda, California. She is currently the Editor of God and Nature, and Co-Chair of Rockville Help, an emergency assistance charitable organization in Rockville, Maryland. The above poem started as a reluctant writing exercise for a course at UC Berkeley Extension.
The perfection of the universe is written around me:
bounded yet infinite space.
Light bounces back and forth
reflecting and refracting
in every direction
defining its liquid geometry.
I sway with the perfect cadence of its smooth substance,
I dance with the caressing currents of its fine-tuned laws,
I’m one with its still, self-enclosed beauty.
I lack nothing: colorful manna falls in its appointed time,
Brine shrimp and worms in their seasons.
Down I go to bury my nose in sand,
to lay in cool green glades of leaves.
Up I glide to the shining flat boundary,
where the gate to nothingness is open,
a soft, rippling surface my fin can break without effort.
I play at jumping into it, just for the thrill,
to shudder at the feel of vacuum on my skin,
to feel the sting of emptiness in my gills.
I draw a circle up there, and laugh on my way down
as the nature of things pulls me back where I belong.
On other days, when I feel like it,
I race along the curved boundary,
brushing its closed hard brilliance with my tail,
thinking about its mysteries.
Some say those images on it are illusions,
tricks of the light as its rays hit our eyes,
paradoxes we can expect at the edges of reality.
Some propose that they are our dreams,
perverse projections from our minds,
things to write poems in the sand about but not take too seriously.
But there are those who think the shadows are real:
that there’s a world on the other side,
like ours, but different,
where strange misshapen beings
with clumsy columns for fins and tails
lumber along their illogically curved paths,
obeying a force unknown to us.
Eli the Black stops me on some days
as I make my rounds,
taps an antenna against the boundary,
curls the others into a frown of gravity
and tells me his theory.
The clumsy shadow creatures, he says, are
no myth
or mirage,
but the very reason we’re here.
They’re the creators of our world,
the designers of its beauty,
the refreshers of its substance.
They provide the flakes and the worms,
they remove what’s dirty and bad
and restore goodness.
I like the story. Some days I almost believe it.
But remember the source: Eli is a Shelled One.
They are half strange themselves, aren’t they?
They spend much of their time stuck to the boundary,
Not knowing the beauties the rest of us share in.
They eat dirt,
and crawl around ungracefully
with those heavy burdens on their backs
whenever they’re not hiding those devilish faces they have.
No wonder they like to make up stories.
I smile at Eli,
the light,
the coolness,
and keep swimming.
Anikó Albert grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University. A serial migrant, she taught English as a Foreign Language in her hometown, high-school Spanish in Kingston, Jamaica, and English and various subjects in Alameda, California. She is currently the Editor of God and Nature, and Co-Chair of Rockville Help, an emergency assistance charitable organization in Rockville, Maryland. The above poem started as a reluctant writing exercise for a course at UC Berkeley Extension.