Dead Fish at the Supermarket by Tom Paine

“Evil is the absence of empathy” –
said Captain Gilbert,
Army psychologist
at the Nuremberg trials.
“It a genuine incapacity to feel.”
I want you to know:
one tree cannot make it rain.
But a forest can make rain.
I want to talk about a glass
of water, old water,
in a silver glass by the sink.
I wish you didn’t despise me.
I’d tell you about a nimbus
around this glass this night.
I enter it when I gaze at a tree.
A light voltage is everywhere.
There is nothing like grasses!
I want to explain, before I go,
this new voltage, how the grief
shattered and a filament flamed.
There is something weird
in the foil eye of a dead fish.
They are still swimming.
What we see, in dead fish
on ice in the supermarket,
neat scaled, submarine rows,
is a lie. Dead fish tell me this?
I knew a man who died
on the operating table;
he came to life to tell me
he had three weeks. He said
this world was a foil, and not
to take it seriously, but swim
like the fish, always swimming
in a deep-blue submarine ecstasy.

Tom Paine’s poetry is upcoming or published in more than sixty international journals, including: in The Nation, The Rialto (UK), The Moth (Ireland), Volt, Vallum (Montreal), Fence, The Common, Epiphany, Green Mountain Review, Forklift, Tinderbox, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. He is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.