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63 Hope There are nights I dream of goldfish, and in my dreams they sing to me in fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna Boys Choir. Although in the daylight they are mostly silent and ravenous— the suction-cup grip of their mouths on my fingertip like tiny rubber bathroom plungers when they rise to strike at an offering of chopped green peas. Sometimes a frenetic clicking of marbles nosed and nudged across the aquarium floor during scavenging sessions for food, sounding like the rack and crack of a game of pool. Such hunger. Such extravagance. Their ovoid bodies are like Faberge eggs filigreed with flakes of hammered gold, a glittering armor of polished gill plates, their dorsal fins elegant ribbed silk fans that open when in motion, and fold themselves shut in repose. Clever pectoral fins maneuver and oscillate like small propellers, and the circling tails flare and twirl with the hypnotic flourish of the toreador’s cape. All is endless metaphor here. All of it. I once read the goldfish memory span was three seconds, and does this mean each moment is an astonishment 64 in a series of quick incarnations spiraling outward the way water ripples away from a disturbance, so that, in the end, each brief flicker of awareness is long enough to learn to simply be, and isn’t this really, after all, enough? One morning I woke to find the red-capped oranda in distress—fins clamped sadly down, listless tail, gasping on the back corner floor of the aquarium. I netted her and put her in a glass bowl sugared with a quarter cup of sea salt crystals— the way my Japanese grandfather once showed my mother, and the way my mother, years later in America, once showed me. And several hours later, the sheer veils of tail and fin began to bloom, to resume their arabesques and veronicas around the sleek shimmer of her white satin body— the scandal of her scarlet cap dipping coquettishly, onyx beads of eyes swiveling in their turquoise socket rings. She swam around and around the clear glass bowl, until my heart swung left and followed her around and around from above the way red-throated loons on the Island of Seto circle and follow the fishing boats, tamed by the fishermen, and calling out with their strange and mournful cries. ...

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