Fish vases
October 26, 2012
incodible
Yesterday I assembled my collection of vases in the shape of fish for a university student to take their photograph. (This is not one of her photographs, which will be good. This is one of my snaps on an allegedly smart phone.) I was included, and dressed in suitable 1950s clothes, although 1950s with, I hope, the weird dyed hair of satire.
Who thought of the idea of vases in the shape of fish? Piscine floristry is a very strange idea indeed. Fish love water, but to leap from this to the idea of jamming roses into a marlin like a new form of bait…
I have written a poem about fish vases, which goes by the imaginative name of ‘Fish vases’:
What mind first thought of a vase
(china, hard, self-contained)
leaping with a gaping mouth
so eager for flower-bait?
Yes, there is water inside,
and fish silver ponds, rivers,
seas. But to make a billabong
of a cod; make marlin smell roses?
Odd is the first word that skims
like a flying fish, bites like barracuda,
in my bemused mind. Weird rises too,
flashy trout to drowning butterfly,
hooked on well cast cunning.
I place violets in the minnows,
arrange long stems in strange,
bright glazed, kettles of fish.
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 
Tonight your flowers sleep with the fishes. Though the excessive eagerness, the too-wide open-mouthedness, of those fishy vases might give me nightmares, were I a cut or picked flower. Lovely, fishy poem!
There is something about them that reminds me of those freaky hard-faced mechanical clowns at fairs or shows where you have to drop a ball at the right time to win a stuffed toy prize. Shudder at that always open mouth! We like eagerness hidden, I think, rather than too explicit. One could chase these ideas into the fraught bedlam of gender, but let’s not get too analytical on a Friday night. I intend to drink like a camel-fish vase unfilled by either water or rose or idea.
And thank you for liking the poem, Tim!
Reblogged this on Barbara's space.