Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter

COMMON ROOM, 1970
    And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me; and I will make you to become fishers of men.
                                            — MARK 1:17
               It was the age of sit-ins
    and in any case, there weren’t enough chairs.
    The guys loped heavy-footed down the stairs
    or raced each other to the bottom, laughing,
    pushing their luck. But here they all crammed in,
    sophomores, born like him in ’51,
    to huddle on the floor of the Common Room.
                   In a corner, a grandfather clock
    startled the hour; hammered it home again.
    He would remember that. The old New England
    rickety dignity of the furniture.
    The eminent, stern faces looking down
    from time-discolored portraits. Or maybe some
    of this was embellishment, added later on.
                   The flickering, thick fishbowl
    of a TV screen, a Magnavox console,
    silenced them all. There, in black and white,
    gray-haired men in gray suits now began
    to pull blue capsules from an actual fishbowl.
    (At least the announcer said they were bright blue.)
    It was the age of drugs. These looked like giant
                   Quaaludes handed out
    by a mad pharmacist, whose grimly poised
    assistant—female, sexless—then unscrewed
    from each a poisonous slip of sticky paper.
    A man affixed that date to a massive chart.
    It was filling up already. (Some poor dude
    named Bert was 7; he punched a sofa cushion.)
                   As for himself, he thought
    of penny candy in a jar a million
    years ago, picked out with his brother
    most days after school. Or times he’d draw
    tin soldiers from the bottom of a stocking.
    (Born two days past Christmas, he’d always seen
    that as good karma: the whole world free to play.)
                   A congressman was rifling
    loudly through capsules, seized some in his fist,
    dropped all but one. Not Jeremy? Good friend,
    socked with 15. Two strangers, 38.
    Ben got 120. Would that be good enough?
    Curses, bluster, unfunny humor, crossed
    fingers for blessed numbers that remained.
                   Somewhere, sometime in
    that ammunition pile awaited his:
    239. He heard the number whiz,
    then lodge safe as a bullet in his brain.
    Like a bullet in a dream: you’re dead, you’re fine.
    No need to wish for C.O. or 4-F.
    Oh thank you, Jesus God. No Nam for him.
                   Yet he was well brought up.
    In decency, rather than dance for joy
    or call up Mom right then from the hallway phone,
    he stayed until the last guy knew his fate.
    Typical Roy, who’d showed up late, freaked out
    when, it appeared, his birthday got no mention.
    He hadn’t heard: they’d hosed him. Number 2.
                   Before the war was lost
    some four years later, a handful in that room
    would battle inside fishbowls, most in color—
    and little men, toy soldiers in a jungle,
    bled behind the glass while those excused,
    life-sized, would sit before it eating dinner.
    He’d lived to be a watcher. And number 2
               in the Common Room that day?
    Clearly not stupid. Roy became a major
    in Independent Projects. Something about
    landscapes in oil, angles of northern sun.
    By the time he graduated, he had won
    a study grant to paint in England, where
    (so his proposal went) the light was different.

FRACTAL
    A fish-shaped school of
    fish, each individual
    shaped like a single
    scale on the larger
    fish: some truths are all
    a matter of scale,
    in the manner that shale
    will flake into thin layers
    of and like itself,
    or a roof is made
    of shingle upon shingle
    of roofish monad.
    Scale, fish, school of fish…
    “That’s a fractal, isn’t it?”
    was your feedback when
    you ate what I said.
    “A form that’s iterated:
    output is input
    ad infinitum.”
    Must I now mull it over?
    I mulled it over.
    This aquarium,
    I thought, was a sort of