This week’s poem was written from a finger of land along Maquoit Bay, south of Brunswick. The speaker, fishing, thinks of his father, and, for a second, becomes his father, and the fish, and any person — all of us swimming “the same current.” When I read a line like this, I know I’m in a poem: “These baits are frail hope / that one dark mouth will take the hook, / end up caught in a cold bucket / of lost talk.
Andrew C. Gottlieb lives and writes in Irvine, California, and his work has appeared in many journals including Arts & Letters, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Orion, and Poetry Northwest. His chapbook, “Flow Variations,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017.
On Mere Point
By Andrew C. Gottlieb
Casting off the dock for stripers
I think of my father’s stories—
fishing for walleye at Sioux Lookout.
The day a snapper ate his catch,
strung and struggling below the pier.
My hands feel for the telltale take,
and I have to laugh. How two men
tooled of the same line
can argue themselves to silence,
watch reels unravel in a flickering tangle.
My fly rides from one phase
of the moon to the other side
of the tide. These baits are frail hope
that one dark mouth will take the hook,
end up caught in a cold bucket
of lost talk. Gravity sinks barbs below
the surface. As if the whole journey
was about the tug of men
and teeth to the trophy end,
as if—standing on this Maine
spit—it was only about one strung word
we could put our fingers to
and simply win with the crimp
of a hissing drag. As if we don’t swim
the same current: rod-stiff—muscles
tense and failing—until that glossy pose,
the wide stilled eye.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2001 Andrew C. Gottlieb. It appeared originally in the Crab Creek Review and appears here by permission of the author. Deep Water: Maine Poems will be accepting submissions during the month of August. For more information, visit mainewriters.org/programs/deep-water/
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