When you feel like a fish, check the weather to see
whether it’s better to bake indoors or grill out.
Small ones can be poached. Small fry can be fried whole.
Any place you buy fish should smell fresh, no trace of bleach
or antiseptic, instead should exude the very attar
of the sea, shore, river or shoal which was their home.
Eschew asphyxiated fish, those with glaucous eyes
and limp flesh. Buy them scaled, gutted, extracted from crushed ice.
Once you have your catch, wash, pat dry. Salt and pepper
the cavity, stuff with smashed garlic and aromatics,
relying on your own counsel and taste — I have a weakness
for basil and thyme and have taken to sumac, the dark
vermilion grains ground from the berries of the tropical
shrub related to mango and cashew; not the southern
US bush with its toxic resin, the poison of the same name.
Sumac, rhus coriaria to be precise, is harmless,
though far from innocuous. Its pungence lays out
a canvas on which aerian savours, here those of fish,
can be feathered or brushed in. In this case what was aquatic
transforms into a wingèd essence which, like a kite, flies
best in a steady wind tethered to the tang of the earth.
If, at this stage, you need lemon, maybe this was not
the right fish. Many like citrus to veil such miasma.
On this point, accomodate your guests. Quarter a couple
with your sharpest knife once the sumptuous fish,
after fifteen minutes in an intensely hot milieu
(flesh at the thickest point showing 145 F)
is deposited with a flourish on a trivet centerpiece —
but only after a short rest, so its juices can seize.
Slide off portions from the top half with a spatula,
ostentatiously detach the bone structure from the tail,
then dangle the head before the gathered assembly,
whose eyes should still look out intact, alert to their fate.
This is when you learn who likes fish, as opposed to
pescatarians from principle. The former will put dibs
on the eyes and those delectable morsels behind the cheeks.
The latter will avert their eyes, praising their choice filet.
***
Nasrin, whose home cuisine is Caspian, will get the joke about fish-head eaters, the slur desert plateau Iranians apply to the denizens of her home province of Gilan. I have surprised myself here with a second in a new sequence of poems, Collations and other Delights. I had given up on writing poetry about food. To do so, I have reverted to but embraced with gusto modes of poetry long fallen from fashion, the encyclopedic, the ekphrastic and the comic. One feature shared by poetry and cuisine is delight. Only the highest of haute cuisine plays with comedy in food. The same might be said of poetry.