(To the tune of The Nature of Things by Lucretius)
IT IS WELL KNOWN that man has made a survey more complete
Of the Lunar surface than of the oceans vast and deep
Which sustain life on Earth. For there is much that is concealed
Beneath the waves; yet some in recent times has been revealed,
And offers up such strange and fertile answers to amaze
Both the squeamish and the scholar, of the ingenious ways
Of the Eel.
My reader’s bound to be familiar with at least the form
Of the Eel, a fish that looks more like a snake or a worm
Because its fins are fused, its body stretches long and thin,
And because its scales are covered by a mucousy skin.
This I may assume because the Eel is a global beast
Which is netted North and South, from the West to the Far East
And many cultures feast upon its flesh. Visit Great Britain
And you will find on docksides the fishermen are smitten
With jellied Eels, while in Aguinaga, the Catholics
Prefer to dine on baby Eels seasoned with oil and garlic.
In Appalachia, trappers smoke their Eels in honey
Over fires of applewood and sell them for good money.
And don’t forget the Japanese, who love the Eel the best
And eat it by the hundred-thousand-ton, broiled and dressed
with a sweet sauce. In the West, Americans have forgot
That when the Pilgrims were starving to death on Plymouth Rock,
Squanto showed them not only how to plant maize in their fields,
But how to spear and build a weir to catch themselves some Eels
And this was what they ate together at their famous meal:
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag gave thanks for the Eel!
In many parts worldwide the Eel supplies not only food
But is Divine, and is a force of Evil or of Good.
The Maori tribes Down Under feed their giant Eels by hand
For it is said they force the shape of rivers and the land
As do the Native Peoples of America delight
In telling to their children of the legendary fight
Between the Lobster and the evil Eel, which forever
Stirred up the mud and slime from the bottom of the river.
Even in cultures which don’t consider Eels religious,
They lend themselves to legends spooky and superstitious
Such as the Scottish monster, which many people guess
Is actually a giant Eel that lives deep in Loch Ness.
A quandary that puzzled ichthyologists no end
Was whereabouts the urge to procreate was wont to send
The Silver Eel, after maturing in the mud and slime
When it departs the rivers for the waters maritime.
The mystery was solved by the eventual success
Of tracking the migration of an Eel by GPS
(No easy task, because the backs of Eels are slippery
And gadgets had a habit of slipping into the sea).
Like the scrum of bubbles that collect when you drain the tub,
The North Atlantic Gyre churns around a weedy hub
Called the Sargasso Sea. It is therein amongst the weed
That Eels are called upon to spawn and spread their eely seed.
The reason for this mystery owed to the simple fact
That after procreating, Silver Eels never go back
To waters fresh, but having laid several million eggs
They are the sort of beast which dies right after having sex.
But this brings up another marvel of the Eel’s design:
The Eel is born without a sex! Upon reaching its prime
Nature designates which Eels are male and which are female
And on their way to mate they grow their genital(ia).
This explains why Naturalists, from Aristotle to Freud,
Assumed that Eels did not give birth but sprung out of the void
Because their junk could not be found, because it wasn’t there—
Yet we all know that life does not spring wriggling from the air!
Stranger still, though Nordic scientists have found the reason,
Due to the fact that these species share a mating season,
American and European Eels can interbreed
And their genetic differences do not seem to impede
The growth of healthy offspring, whose internal GPS
Sends them north to Iceland, a country which is more or less
Halfway en route between their Motherland and Fatherland.
The split between the species, we have come to understand,
Occurred three million years ago when Panama arose
And split the Oceans, and divided half the Eels from those
On the other side. Since then the only real difference
That they have evolved is of their relative endurance,
The distance they can swim; for it’s a travesty that while
The American Eel must swim for fifteen hundred miles
The European Eel swims for five thousand kilometers
Before it reaches the Sargasso’s green breeding waters.
December 2016