SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Eleven
RICHARD RYAL
Lungfish
The textbooks say lungfish invented language
but I say no, they only discovered it.
The sea face barely rippled
when lungfish first broke the surface
to follow muffled noises in the breeze,
murmurs that shook their bellies a little.
They, coughing in the starlight,
did not recognize the miracle
was their own voices they had never heard.
Words are born of water, which seeks its depth,
but language, the maddening of meanings, seeks height,
is fire, no more governed by gravity
than figures puzzled into patterns on a cave wall,
rust brown bodies of shaggy bulls and antelope
and red hunters skinny as their spears
in a hunt, in a dream of a hunt,
a hounding song in visual rhythm.
Some of the stick men are painted with animal heads
as cousins to the herds. This frenzy sketched by torchlight
helped ceremonies conjure weightless visions
not much different from those we forget
the moment we wake. I wake sometimes
to cough up another muttering lungfish
onto paper from the murk in my chest,
guttural prayers stuck sideways in the capillaries
mazed below the base of my throat
in the voice when I was a baby
that pooled into caves
where it chants of tides
and other things it couldn't know.
Richard Ryal lives in Fort Lauderdale, South Florida, and teaches poetry at Broward College in the same state. His poems appear in South Florida Poetry Journal.
