Unagi Nigiri
Let's workshop this poem, inspired by Eugenio Montale's famous poem "The Eel," about the adventures of an eel that seems to grow evermore incorporeal and evermore our kin along its journey
Unagi Nigiri For Eugenio Montale The eel's magnetism, who can resist? We turn to death-denial busy work, yes. Its seductions, however, titillate us all. From the frigid Baltic the eel courses: through our seas and estuaries, muscling rivers and creeks—one unhinged muscle reaching, in overkill, isolated patches of mud. Photons from a cosmic furnace, one day like any, refract off the chestnuts. That yellow, piercing our wells and ditches, does more than disclose the eel in the rank stagnancy. Light roils her in those wells and ditches cascading down the flanks of the Apennines to Romagna. Taken by an inner—almost linguistic—pull to the Adriatic, the eel rises into a symbol: into a torch that guides, a whip that goads. This Earth-affirming arrow of love shepherds the gullies and cracked beds of the Pyrenees back to a wet-ass p: paradise of procreation. The eel contracts into a spirit seeking green life even in droughted desolation’s gnaw. Snubbing Jesus heaven (that end of powerplay exploitation we see from vines twirling until they hook what lifts them for free to more sun), it says “All starts when all appears charred like a buried stump.” The eel, how can it fail to compel us to see it as kin: that precious iris twinned in your hair, matching the irises that are within—that are your eyes? These flowers keep you vivacious in the midst of young men mired in your mud. How can you think it is not your blood sister?
