Like any truly spellbinding poem, ‘Invisible Fish’ touches on a variety of themes. From the incessant procession of time to an acknowledgment of our debt to ancestral generations. While the symbol that Joy Harjo hinges much of the poem on is the humble yet baffling image of an “invisible fish” and “ghost ocean.”
Through a whirlwind of time-traveling imagery, the poet illustrates the ceaseless change the landscape and its inhabitants undergo over the course of centuries and millennia. Summoning a compelling if not somewhat depressingly sardonic, vision of the future and present simultaneously.
Summary
‘Invisible Fish’ by Joy Harjo offers a surreal but lucid snapshot of life on earth unburdened by our typically linear perception of time.
‘Invisible Fish’ opens with a bizarre description of a desert landscape where a “ghost ocean” once existed. All that remains of this ancient sea are just “waves of sand” and “water-worn rock.” This expanse of water is also where the titular “invisible fish” once swam.
The poem starts to leap forward in time in the next few sentences. Evolution launches the fish out of the ocean as they “learn to walk.” Humans then enter the frame, coming “ashore” like the fish to “paint dreams on the dying stone.” Another hurdle leads the speaker into the modern era. A place where “Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants,” cover a landscape that was once an “ocean floor.”
Structure and Form
‘Invisible Fish’ is a prose poem consisting of four sentences organized into a single paragraph. Although not structured as lines of verse or stanzas, Harjo’s poem utilizes a number of poetic techniques, such as fragmentation and figurative language. There is even a cadence created by her use of caesura and repetition, as well as the presence of end rhymes within the sentences.
Literary Devices
‘Invisible Fish’ contains some of the following literary devices:
- Visual Imagery: “this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock” and “humans will come ashore.”
- Kinesthetic Imagery: “Invisible fish swim” and “Soon the fish will learn to walk.”
- Personification: “dying stone.”
Detailed Analysis
Sentences 1-2
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk.
In the first sentence of ‘Invisible Fish,’ the speaker offers a strange vision that’s given form by Harjo’s use of visual and kinesthetic imagery. One in which paradoxically “invisible fish” swim through a “ghost ocean.”
The latter half of the sentence reveals that this expanse of water no longer exists, and all that is left behind is an arid landscape filled with “waves of sand, by water-worn rock.” Their diction underscores the fact that even in its absence, water is exceptionally ubiquitous.
One interpretation is that the speaker is envisioning a fish and ocean that no longer exist. But this is only an echo or “ghost” of the past — the second sentence drags the reader eons backward through time to a significant moment in the chain of evolution on Earth.
Sentences 3-4
Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. (…)
In the third sentence of ‘Invisible Fish,’ the speaker moves forward to another crucial moment in our planet’s history: the arrival of humankind. Just like the fish, these primordial humans “come ashore” — a possible reference to the transitory nature of early peoples that also foreshadows the seafaring arrival of colonization.
Yet these particular people are described and romanticized as “dreamers” who paint their dreams on “dying stone.” In other words, they created and lived. But like the fading rocks that served as their canvas and homes, time would eventually wither them all away.
It’s here that the speaker makes one last jump forward in time. Harjo effectively frames the poem around the present state of this “ocean floor,” which is bleakly described as being “punctuated by Chevy trucks.” The juxtaposition of the absent ocean with a desert of filled with gas-guzzling automobiles touches on modern tensions between the environment and industry.
But the poem’s commentary doesn’t stop there. Inside the trucks sit the progeny of those first dreamers who — like the fish — braved land all those ages ago. The modern human is much less romanticized by the speaker, who reveals rather anticlimactically that these descendants are not painting their dreams like their forebearers, but just heading to the store.
FAQs
The poem’s central theme is that time slows down for neither nature nor man. It propels us through radical evolution and vanishes us from the earth, filling every second and inch of reality with the faint memories of what no longer exists.
Many of Harjo’s poems center on forging connections with the past. In doing so she emphasizes the wealth of wisdom to be gathered therein. This poem expresses not just a need to acknowledge previous generations but also our own meekness in the face of time’s tide. When not even the oceans or rocks are spared — it would be folly to think any one moment is more eternal or singular than another.
The “invisible fish” of the poem’s title is imagined by the speaker as this “ghost” of the past. One that symbolizes all things remembered or forgotten that no longer exist, from the ancient ocean to our ancient ancestors.
Harjo uses the present tense for the most part throughout the poem. Describing the past as if it is happening in real-time or simultaneously with the present. The poem lifts the veil off our limited perception of time — unifying past, present, and future.
The tone of the poem might be perceived as indifferent, bordering on apathetic. Like a personification of time itself, the speaker narrates with unmoving emotion the way the world is altered across ancient and modern times. At the same time, the final sentence appears to sarcastically juxtapose these mythic and surreal moments of antiquity with the chore-filled humdrum of contemporary life.
Similar Poems
- ‘In this short life that only lasts an hour’ by Emily Dickinson – this poem also touches on time and our inability to control it.
- ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley – this poem similarly takes place in a desert and is narrated by a speaker who ruminates on time’s erasure of legacy.
- ‘Beeny Cliff’ by Thomas Hardy – this poem also hones in and reflects on a particular place and moment in time.
