a) Josh Bell wrote a poem about a group of people finding a mermaid and describing what happens to her. What did the people do the mermaid and what did they eventually learn? In other words, what do you think the “moral” of the poem is, and why?

b) How do you think the speaker feels, and why? Do you think his feelings change at all throughout the course of the poem? Show examples of where you can tell what his feelings are and if they change throughout the poem.

c) The poem ends with “two plus two / was often four, and all across America / beauty comes to such an end.” How are you interpreting these lines? What is he attempting say about “beauty”?

1. Far from Indiana and the soup we made of her bones lies the ocean, cheap and full of secrets.
2. There are certain things you have to know.
3. We carried her over land, iced down in a truck.
4. We remember her eyes, mostly, orphaned and crossed by the sea. We fed her bits of herself, and other fish.
5. We checked and rechecked the math.
6. We stuck her with vitamins, wrapped her in wet cloth.
7. Otherwise, we believed, her legs would begin, but her fever that would have killed her anyway had made the skin tough above the flesh, a sheet of rusting steel across a soft bed, and there was the smell of ammonia.
8. Her heart was dying, and protective of rain, which was her blood, which is one thing the books were wrong about, make note.
9. It’s true that most of the myth we’d already murdered by the shore when we drew her from the net, and when our palms burned into the slime that gilded her it smelled of apricots cooked in mud.
10. We looked and looked for the gills.
11. Starfish called from the waves with a sound one could have mistaken for laughter, but most of us heard as instructions.
12. The gulls seemed to drop from webs out of a sky impossible to read.
13. How to feed her air was a concern, but briefly.
14. Someone cried out about lungs and wrapped her hair with kelp.
15. Yes, she flopped but as a woman would.
16. I went to the gas station for ice and bait, but mostly she was lost from the start.
17. Later, when we separated the top from the bottom,
18. I couldn’t help but think we were seeing the last of something.
19. We found pills and bread inside her, you should note.
20. We saved samples of tissue, pale wafers of information which gave us hope.
21. But there was no tool, no matter how sharp, could dissociate her eyes, could find the difference between the foam and dirt in her biology, not there.
22. We knew enough not to try until we were full and sad, like cartridges.
23. At first the eyes seemed healthy on their own, freed, come-hither, and looking West for the body which we’d dumped in a ditch, lord help us.
24. It is in this way that surgery helps you think, like what we did with her legs
25. (I see them still, electric and pink), though I do not wonder what she thought of us, brave and ashen, embarrassed for our hands.
26. She didn’t have a language to tell us anyway; just ragged whispers toward the end, like a god being forced through a keyhole.
27. Some men who heard her dove into the rocks.
28. Those who did not die wonder of their pulses, to this day, and search for it in their wrists.
29. So the throat and tongue we fear to examine, though we’ve preserved them, and they fail to sing.
30. One hopes she thought well of us, however, when we finally did the quiet thing then laid her on the table. Her eyes were lonely for nerve and reef; the night was young; two plus two was often four, and all across America beauty comes to such an end.
31. THE CARE AND FEEDING OF MERMAIDS (2004) by Josh Bell

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a Mermaid a fabled marine creature with the head and upper body of a human being and the tail of a ... View the full answer