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MEMORIAL DAY
Fishing the oxbows of the Lamprey River
With my sons is how we can revisit my father
Closer than the Bitterroot, where we
scattered his ashes.
Gabriel, himself tossed back by the
Angel of Death
Just a week ago, is no longer grateful
Simply to be able to swallow:
He wants the mosquitoes to stop biting
And the trout to start. Jacob catches
One freshwater mussel and two trees,
A white pine and a hemlock. He claims
Both are too small to keep.
Uncle Cookie lands a six-incher,
And extracts the hook as carefully as
the surgeon
Backed the Mylar Star of David out of
Gabriel’s distal esophagus last Sunday night.
Cookie holds the stunned fish
upright in the water
Until it can flash from his hand like a knife.
Catch and release is the story of my life,
of all our lives:
But a Titleist winks up at me from
the moss-black
Granite of the river bottom, ten miles
Upstream from the nearest country club,
Like a jokey message from the old man
Who taught six grandsons how to fish
And how to judge a lie. He claims
He’s all right after all. It wasn’t hell
he smelled
As he was dying, it was my lost
brother Michael,
On the other side, firing up the grill for
trout.
from "Dying for Beginners" Lost Borders Press
Author's copyright 2006 |
