This week’s poem, “Eel Fork,” tells of tools, a fishery and their changes over a century. I love the specificity with which poet David Sloan describes the device, the lives of the creatures and the shifting nature of hunting them. “Eel Fork” appears in Sloan’s second collection, “The Rising,” which is out this month. He will give a virtual reading at 7 p.m. on April 23. Join here, using the password “poetry”.
A graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA poetry program, David Sloan teaches at Maine Coast Waldorf High School in Freeport. His debut poetry collection, “The Irresistible In-Between,” and his second, “The Rising,” were published by Deerbrook Editions.
Eel Fork
By David Sloan
It looks like the offspring
of a garden weeder and Medieval
disemboweler. A hundred years ago
some hopeful eeler secured it
to an oiled maple handle
longer than a harpoon, then stood
with his spear uplifted, his slow-drifting
scow in a Penobscot shallows,
waited for a glimpse of slither
among the reeds, then jabbed
at any mud that moved.
Did he feel a pang, if not remorse,
then envy—for a fish whose life
would have been all symmetry,
begun and ended in the sea
without shores, sea of whirlpools
and ghost ships—or for the eel’s
shape-shifting gift: leaf-like to elver
to silver; its first home salt, then brackish
pools, then freshwater and back,
the last orgiastic intertwining,
spawning and finally spent?
He would never have imagined
a century later, rusted fork prongs
hanging on a barn wall, boat and spear
replaced by a dip net chained
and buoyed in a Down east estuary
on a moonless spring night,
tide running in, when the fortunes
of a family with six kids and a rusting
truck depended upon how many
writhing glass eels—see-through
black-eyed beauties—they haul in.
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Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Eel Fork.” copyright 2020 by David Sloan, reprinted from his collection A Rising (Deerbrook Editions, 2020), by permission of the author.
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