Our shadows bring them from the shadows:
a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern
like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales.
A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple
and a patch of gray. One with a gold head,
a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins
like half-folded fans of lace.
A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one,
and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water.
They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us
as we lean on the cement railing
in indecisive late-December light,
and because we do not feed them, they pass,
then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop.
“Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them,
like a subplot or a motive, is a school
of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned,
perhaps another species, living in the shadow
of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white,
seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses,
unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.
~Susan Kolodny “Koi Pond, Oakland Museum”

The boardwalk,
a treachery of feathers ready
to receive another broken bone,
looms just above the surface.
Step deliberately when approaching.
With few exceptions,
ice has claimed this part of the pond.

This is where you see her,
moving through what
free water remains:
a sluggish ghost in the shadows,
slow, conserving the fragile heat
she still has in this late winter.
A canopy of juniper dressed with light snow
overhangs, watching.

Last year, a quorum of her kind was lost,
turned to stone, to frigid silence.
She doesn’t know that story,
but some instinct guides her to keep
what warmth she can, to cruise
in stubborn torpor.

In her drift, she remembers the summer,
her long, languid vowels,
the accompanying texts of her companions.
How they interwove manuscripts,
narrations of sky, tree, sun, and moon.
Warm days are a memory now,
and thoughts rest lightly in her body.

She has held the same posture for an hour.
Her bones have reached a conclusion—
an idea about hope itself—
there, near the indifferent bridge,
inches from the force that will take her
~Carolyn Adams, “Koi Pond” from Going Out to Gather

The water going dark only
makes the orange seem brighter,
as you race, and kiss, and spar
for food, pretending not
to notice me. For this gift
of your indifference, I am
grateful. I will sit until
the pond goes black, the last
orange spark extinguished.
~Robert Peake from “Koi Pond”

Koi and goldfish thrived in our pond after we covered it with netting, finally thwarting the herons arriving at dawn for breakfast.

Thus protected, our fish grew huge, celebrating each feeding with a flurry of tail flips and gaping mouths as I tossed pellets to them each evening.

When the pond cooled in the fall and sometimes ice-covered in winter, the fish settled at the bottom, barely moving silhouettes of color in the darkness. Spring would warm them to action again. As the water temperature rose, so did they, eager and hungry to flash their color and fins again.

Two winters ago, the chill winds and low temperatures lasted longer than usual. As the pond ice began to melt, the fish at the bottom remained still as stones. Netting them for burial felt like burying the sun and the moon and the stars, relegating their rainbows of light and color deep into the earth.

No longer would their colorful glory shine, an illumination now extinguished.

I haven’t had the heart to try again. I need a pond heater, a new filter system, and a total clean out of the pond if I am going to restock.

But then I remember the joy of feeding those flashes of fins and fish mouths, so I just might try again.

Rainbows promise to return, even from buried stone.

Lyrics
From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God
From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
And I shall not want I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness
I shall not want
From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God