Somehow, it was fishing that did it.
Pretty familiar concept to a poet, fishing –
Send a line down and see what comes up.
Remark and throw back the illegal stuff,
The too-big animals, the crap landsharks.
If it’s just right, bring it home to your friends, your folks,
And it’s free, good eating.
I learned it’s called jigging
When you let the sinker down and dance it back up
One quick reel at a time.
(And, just so,
You caught me here, jigging this rhyme.)
The whales love it, but I’m a little ill-accustomed
To a constant man’s length of salty up and down.
I turned green around the gills somewhere between
The striper and the three dogfish; I wanted nothing more
Than more than seven feet of fiberglass between me and this
Great yawing blue thing people have no business walking on.
Captain David turned the boat shoreward, and turned me around
When he got me to talking about you.
I wanted to say more, that your eyes are the color mine want to be,
That you’re the only man who ever made me realize
I was being made love to when you were making love to me,
That you make me understand what the kindness in a kind man is worth,
And the other kinds of sentimental stuff I haven’t yet tried to write a poem about.
Later, I saw pictures of the catches Captain David made –
Fish his friends and wife and kids caught:
Big and small, some too beautiful to live underwater,
Much less on the world,
And some long-jawed, silly, or ugly as sin.
I guess he loosed the hope, jigging in deep sea of myself,
Of catching fish by your side,
Of sharing them with our friends and our folk,
Of going back for more free, good eating
Whenever our hearts took the notion to board
This small, earthly vessel that lets us ride the chop
Out to where the whales play.
