Arlene Corwin writes

Collapsing In On Itself

A week-dead pike on local stone wall,

Placed there or dropped by some passing seagull

And ignored; once fresh and full now meagre and dull,

Is almost the same as the day that it came,

But entrails have started to go.

(Are they ‘entrails’?  I don’t really know.)

Of course it has innards; the roe, liver gall,

And I’d guess there’s a stomach.

It think it’s a pike - maybe perch, not a haddock!

The thing that’s essential, its cardinal what-ness

Is something that shows now whenever I pass it. 

Everything rotten or heading that way,

Falls in on itself in its terminal rot-ness.

A pike, a carp, a perch, and various other fish, nets and other fishing equipment on a table -- Pieter de Putter