Fishing?
Crawling slowly, or so it seems.
Light shines through the slits of the forest —
obscured, diminished. The water is cold and the multiple jeans
provide warmth from the freezing water and shade,
The sting of a beetle or mosquito,
and protects from the bite of the Water-Moccasin.
The Oklahoman sky appears disjunctly, a brief glimpse through a
slit between trees. Birds chirp their nonsense; perhaps confuse younge ears.
Once and a while, ears and eyes see a bird obscuring
that slit of light, belting the confusing call.
‘Forward to the dam,’ or was it, ‘keep walking, Will,’
does it even matter? Make it to the dam, the fishing is good there.
Sunlight punches through trees with names lost to time,
Water-moccasin catches my eye and grabs my leg in fangs.
A shot rings out (or was it two?) and it is gone.
Only chunks of perforated flesh remain.
We continued walking as the clouds rolled in to extinguish
that great light, the sun. It was time to fish.
We caught one, put it back. Nature began to fight us with
an assault of wind, battering us ceaselessly.
We caught another fish, but it escaped as we held it.
It slipped through our hands. The daylight slipped away.
The clouds broke open once again, some time later,
Revealing blue skies and sunlight through the canopy.
That day, we did not catch the fish we wanted;
instead, we caught the sunlight.
