I fell into the river. My flesh was rejuvenated by the water’s touch.
My complexion turned pretty and delightful again.
My revived skin shifted inside itself.
And I became a water-being. In this state, I could easily swim to the
bottom.

Passing the flippancy of colorful fish, the inborn bewilderment
of smaller fish, and the nosiness of seaweed,
admiring the tadpoles’ efforts, grateful
for the eels’ retreat, I reached the water’s secluded shelter,
the nest where the current goes languid. In this drowsy,
absent-minded structure,
I came across a fish
that had been there
since the beginning of water.

I didn’t touch this fish.

One mustn’t touch fish. For, in order to hold a fish,
one must squeeze its body. Fish whose bodies are squeezed
quickly run out of breath.
However tender and well-intentioned, the fish struggles to fend off
any palm of the hand that has opened for it.
The fish is friend only to those
who know by observing, who settle for seeing.

The fish and I stopped, side by side.

One can only stop side by side with a fish.
Rather than move across from it and attempt to soothe it...
Rather than move behind it and get battered by the waves of its tail…
Rather than wander above and below it, bewildering the fish…
One can stop only side by side with a fish.
This way, you can observe what the fish observes.

Neither diving toward it, nor it toward you, growing side by side.

The fish understands.

The fish lives in understanding’s widest, most intrinsic vein.
Since it understands,
it stays still
and observes everything that flows by.
The fish, without collecting the things it has observed in its transparent
mind,
comprehends things
and abandons them to the water. The fish’s understanding of things
does not prevent them from flowing in the water.
The fish’s understanding is identical
with the water’s flow.

I observed what the fish observed.

Shutting down my brain’s functions, I tried to make
my mind transparent. Soon, I would have nothing left
to say. If I stayed this way a while longer,
I’d be left dumbfounded in fish time.
It was tender, honestly: my mind was turning into water.
With an ineffably streaming flow.

A turtle interrupted our stance.

It swam, it came, it found our shelter.
Its shell, which carried everything it had ever seen,
was entirely different from the fish and me.
That’s why it was so somber, so sad.
Its sorrow belonged to those who gather, and in gathering, inflate their
minds.

The fish looked at me. At the turtle. Amazed
that a mind could be so meaty, that a body
could carry all of time’s wounds.

The fish forgot that it understood. It flowed with the water.
Just a moment ago, it was here, understanding something.
Before sense could come, the fish retreated from what it had understood.