The Backyard Is an Alternate Universe

Goldfish and Dictionary Text

Ghost Goldfish

James Hart

for my son Ethan, when he turns 50

There’s unmarked space in our backyard where

no careless digging is allowed, where for 20 years

small forms assembled one by one:  a succession

of princely cats in shoe boxes lined with towels,

a hamster in a coffee tin, a goldfish in an olive jar.

At first I buried furtively, as if passersby

might snicker at the friction I made with spade.

In time, there were witnesses, my young sons

examining docile death in its famished fur,

touching paws or whiskers before we sealed

lids with tape and placed the boxes in their beds,

covered them with care, mud and love heavy

on our fingers. And once my youngest boy

brought home a sparrow flat from the street,

placed in what proximity of hamster, cat, or fish

I wish I remembered now, a five-year-old

dragging home a prize by bird claw, his hand

somehow a cat’s mouth in its gentle grasp.

His hair spilling cat shine in the sun, my son

asked “Daddy, can we have a funeral?”

and soon the sparrow flew with ghosts

of cats under summer air, the turf recalling

no disturbance there, so little space a sparrow

needs.  Now afraid I’ll tell his teenage friends,

he shrugs and blushes if I mention this, but I

at ten times his five believe there was mercy

in his practicing that will stead me well someday

when my soul will purr away perhaps in furless

winter, or wrapped in summer’s cotton towel,

just-bathed yet unprepared for the surprise

of visitors at the door, I drop from air like his

sparrow to roam restlessly with our spirit cats.

Isn’t that what we all desire? To know there,

somewhere under familiar lily beds, ghost

goldfish swim perfectly in gentle jars of air.

January 23, 2002; March 10, 2007