anguilla anguilla

Nearly due to their strange
life cycles, shyness, metamorphoses,

toward Sargasso, across the Atlantic
anguilla anguilla [1]

secretive in a way that seems
deliberate and preordained [2]

their body like a willow leaf
virtually transparent

like a gradually inflating balloon,
in the same fields at night, [3]

glass eel delicacy. [4]
Eel fisherman along the Oria

have other reasons to continue, [5]
their body parts, coloring, and modern

behaviors, tetete tatata, and in fact [6]
Tisquantum with his armful of eels,

kindly, with no apparent logic, [7] while
to the eel, death seemed relative. [8]

It adapts to conditions of the journey [9]
allowing for a quantum of optimism.

excerpts from The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson, English translation copy by Agnes Broomé, published by Harper Collins 2020

[1] p.2 "when at last it reaches Europe, it undergoes its first metamorphosis."
[2] "Eels have turned out to be not only uncommonly difficult to observe"
[3] p.v from poem "A Lough Neagh Sequence" by Seamus Heaney - "Later in the same fields / He stood at night when eels / Moved through the grass like hatched fears"
[4] p.3 Frail and seemingly defenseless, considered a delicacy by, amongst other people, the Basques."
[5] p.91 "...other reasons to continue with their trade. They simply don't want to stop... this was precisely what their ancestors did before them and because this particular way of fishing for eel is... what makes them who they are."
[6] p.16 "how they lived and procreated, what they ate, their behaviors. Modern zoology grew out of the Historia Animalium; it remained a standard work ..."
[7] p.104 "Tisquantum had taught the pilgrims how to catch eels and where to find them."
[8] p.33 "It continued to move for minutes without a head."
​[9] p. 5 "the silver eels wander back into the Atlantic and set off toward the Sargasso Sea"

I have been using this postcard as my straight edge to underline ideas and gems in the text.

a photo of The Book of Eels, open to page 3, with a postcard that displays a woman, an artist, needling with wool while sitting in a tree in downtown Boise, Idaho, with a txapela on her head masking her face, Basque flags displayed on the street poles behind her. This postcard is from MING Studios and promotes the exhibition Irutzen Har Nuzu - I Am Making Wool.

a photo of the front cover of The Book of Eels, Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, promoted as "Captivating" by Wall Street Journal in text printed on the cover and as 100 Notable Books 2020 by The New York Times on a round yellow sticker in the upper right corner; in the lower left, my hand holding the book.