from DOWNSIDES OF FISH CULTURE (1997)

A POEM ABOUT PIKE

 

 

Take the fork sitting next to your plate

and stab it into your hand. You’re lucky you’re not

swimming. The pike, like a shark, lives

for blood. A big pike will try to eat a full-grown duck.

They’d like to be alligators.

A pike’s eyes glow in the dark.

If you catch one watching you you’d better pull anchor.

I once caught a pike in a ditch

and it had a warbler in its stomach,

and another pike, and a zippo lighter.

A man at work told me he caught a bass

in Pine Lake with its stomach torn out. A pike had gutted it for him.

The pike is a million years old. It’s seen every craft

man’s invented. It’s too voracious for its own good

though, and will attack

a paint-chipped spoon dangled over the edge of a rowboat.

Its brain’s about the size of a marble.

The best way to catch a pike is with a sucker

or shiner hooked through the spine.

In Indiana a northern pike mauled a child

playing patty-cake in the shallow water of an inland lake.

The clouds stayed pink for days.

 

A POEM ABOUT BLUEGILLS 

 

 

There are poems about bluegills. There are poems  

about trout. The bluegill doesn’t give a shit. 

It’ll eat a bare hook but would rather not hear  

about your childhood. The bluegill’s thick headed.  

It hunkers down in the weeds, thinking. The trout’s like a young girl  

in a wedding gown. Touch it and it dies. 

You can pull a bluegill out of a pike’s ass, it might  

still swim away. I’m not talking about pumpkinseeds,  

those little flecks of tinsel. The bluegill’s  

the stud of all panfish. People catch pumpkinseeds  

thinking they’re bluegills. A pumpkinseed shivers; 

it thinks it’s going to convince you it’s cold. 

Bluegills are fatalists. A slab in your hand may jerk its head  

twice. Once hooked it goes for the mud. By the time  

it’s resting on a flotation device it’s willing to die.  

It doesn’t grope like a rock bass, swallowing air, 

the bluegill’s a realist. It knows it’s just a wedge of painted flesh, 

heavy enough to pull you half out of the boat.  

If you’ve got a big white bucket of panfish  

sitting on top of the ice, the bluegill’s the one still living, 

thinking, its head like a stapler, mulling things over.  

 

FLOOD  

 

 

How dry the death was  

and when he spoke all the summer street lights  

showed was coal  

in piles and cracked into walkways. 

Said he’d been to Alabama 

and Tennessee, dug a cave in some foothills  

there and lined it with paw paw leaves. 

We sang stupid songs all night  

just to forget the racks of men’s ribs  

hung over the river  

most of us supposed were dug out of graves,  

but you’re careful anyway, 

the bones wine-stained in the firelight  

and clacking together in the slightest  

hot breeze. Just up the hill was all the pavement  

you could ask for, 

working traffic signals, and an office building  

dimly lit. We looked inside 

and saw piranhas swimming  

in a tank of green water, 

bleached out and round  

as country moons flashing through trees.  

The telephone poles buzzed  

overhead as we tipped a washtub of beer cans  

against the mesh in the spring  

that flowed cold out of Castor’s Hill  

and over the roots of the bear oaks 

like out of the soft, lanced side  

of Christ. We were just begging to be released  

that night, the boy with death blowing  

over his dry, cracked lips, the moon in his blonde  

hair. We walked between buildings in black  

coats then looked over rocks  

a mile down into the blind gorge  

and got out our small bags of white bread.  

 

 

 MARANATHA  

 

 

It was our friends who died  

young raining through the trees  

in the middle of the night. 

Trimburger blew himself up with a homemade bomb 

designed by Sullivan. 

Sullivan said the pine needles  

were talking and we listened.  

A mile away Lake Michigan crashed  

against the pier making sand  

while the stars exploded  

all around us  

and someone said There’s Mark who’d swallowed  

a twenty-two barrel  

and said in his note he was afraid  

of the purple weeds. 

We shivered in the leaves  

trying to scrape out the sound of blood  

pumping through our veins  

when Boy came walking out of the beeches  

half-naked and bleeding. 

We all knew who he was, and we wetted our shirts  

where the water shattered the moon.  

TRAVELING

 

 

Sometimes I feel all out of proportion

to the tangible world,

my half-lived streets merely smoldering

among cardboard walls and pop-up trees,

but this particular morning strays

without leaving my basement,

up the window’s mote-flecked stream and out,

where without a car I drive past a friend’s familiar

brick house

with its lone motorcycle and still lit

front porch light,

and the celery flats, the flooded fields

on either side of River Road

with the flat-red ramshackle pole barns

sided with dented tin

and the automobile graveyards, the cars up on blocks,

doorless and empty (in the pivotal light

they look as if they’re weeping),

through the rock-and-pitted landscape

that could be Gary, Indiana,

and up the downhill slope,

the fields of milk- and knapweed,

pockets of standing water,

brown grass, cattails.

Then Kings Highway, the still well-water pumped

village of Comstock,

and the black-haired old woman rocking

in sundress meant for somebody younger.

More flat, blanched fields,

sumac, an occasional dogwood,

abandoned apple orchards

(the apples I remember were gnarled

and had worms—we’d climb the apple trees

and breathe in apple-scent instead),

while far ahead in the just-beginning-to-rise

heat, a period

turns into three flapping crows

turns into a dead raccoon,

eyes open and belly-up,

having died where the world funnels into

a miles-long archway of blowing trees;

oaks and maples and basswoods reach out over the road

as you enter the light-flecked tunnel,

and the open fields

snap in long horizontal distances

back toward the horizon,

because now you’re really moving,

traveling,

speeding through the green, flickering light,

arriving, and having already arrived.