By the River

(For Eric)

You said that dad always liked to take you fishing.
You had the patience to sit and wait and watch.
Crowds of words didn’t chatter in your head
and the squawk of crows was enough to settle
your need for language.
Your landscape was rural—as factual
as a barbed hook.
Your talent was observation and from the fishing camp
in upward look you knew every girder and rivet in Bonnie’s Bridge.
The low drone of tires biting into the grate of bridge road plate
were notes in your margins of ring-worn cylinders and asbestos brakes,
raining down fiber and fumes into your lungs.
And the tart purple-black of the elderberry
growing wild in the shrub and brush behind you
set upon your plate the small hard seed of being.

You spit washed the world.
And the lines of slender death
that you and dad cast out held a spell into the river
conjuring the Channel Cat.

I remember you telling me
how you once closed your eyes
and saw a whiskered leviathan coming up
through the mud and silt. And how you leapt up
expecting to hear a reel go screaming
and see a flash of hands grab a pole
to set the hook—but there was only dad,
bottle fallen from his hand
mumbling to himself something about the war;
and you settled back to watch rainbows in thin film of oil
floating by from dump of barge bilge water,
being was enough for you,
you had no apprenticeship in the shop of asking why.
When evening settled out of light
your play was the snapping of the fire
and the certain beauty of the stars;
and without a word you would crawl into the
the bed of the old pickup and sleep and dream
of barges with their deep draft sucking
the river under them, revealing the slope of shore to channel.
And of the long wide throat which swallows everything,
the infinite gullet of the Channel Cat.
And you would headless turn
in the Sleepy Hollow of your hard bed
and see in swirls and eddies of consciousness
the yellowing pages of years drift under the bridge,
and your children born,
and grandpa,
and grandma,
and dad,
and mom,
and your beloved Uncle Carl.
wrapped in the
Channel Cat’s whiskers.
And when dawn broke
you would awaken
one half century later
to the screaming reel of now
feeling the swelling in your neck,
and the Oat Cell Cancer
schooling in your lungs.

Your lesson
to sit and wait and watch
rained upon our cheeks
as tears.

© 2009 Dan Kantak

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