The flying fishes complicate the sea.
In that one prime determinant of change
They who do not become contrive to be.
Flight will not postulate them other breath,
Or saltness hostile to a warmer blood
Greet the returning flesh with its own death.
The winds they enter and the drift they leave,
No more the catalysts of compromise,
Give back still pure the pure form both receive.
Time, feathering your archaeopteryx,
Have not you flight enough? Must still you force
Blind, you-on age-old clay its air’s new tricks?
Branch to ascending branch, by sea, by air,
Make salt the blood as you estrange the scale?
And if unbreathing offers what we were,
Why then endure, as if by their own wish,
Time’s gathering deformities? Have now,
Cold into cold and time deformed by flesh,
One timeless transit of the flying fish.
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