Fishing on the Quabbin Reservoir in November: An Abecedarian
After Billy Collins’ “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July;”
with thanks to Susan Vespoli for Kerplunk and Zip
About his poem “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,”
Billy
Collins
Declared, “That is something I am unlikely
Ever to do.” That made me laugh.
Fishing is something I adored when, as a
Girl, I would rise predawn,
Haul out the tackle and drive
In the fog to the Quabbin Reservoir with my dad.
Just as the sun rose, we’d set our bait
Kerplunk! Our lines dropped into the placid
Lake, bobbers rising and falling gently on the surface as
Minnow or worm wriggled in the depths.
Not that we ever caught much, though there is
One photo of me, about fifteen, grinning
Proudly with a bass in each hand. Still, the
Quiet morning, the gentle waves
Rocking the rowboat, my dad in his plaid cap
Smoking his pipe as we sat waiting together, expectant.
These things I loved more than pulling
Up the line, or unhooking a sharp-scaled fish. The
Very essence of fishing is not the catch, but the
Wait, that liminal time in which, like an
X,
You cross through the midpoint between start and end ’til
Zip! The fishing’s done.
Go Now
After Ilya Kaminski’s “A Farewell to Friends”
How do you write a biography of rain?
Something that was never born, will never
die. But it lives as surely as birds, wild
carnations, chickens. We know it
as our closest companion. Sometimes quiet,
sometimes pelting, driving deep into earth,
into earth, into earth, until a tower arises
from the moist soil, a tower of birds.
A biography of rain. The pages turn and turn,
from love to destruction, from grief
to joy, from the white curtain that obscures
the pine forest before us to the sparkling drops
on the branches at sunrise after the storm.
I go now as if for the first time
into that pine-scented room. The muted
crackle of damp branches under my feet
leads me forward.
Valerie Roach is a writer who lives in strawberry country on the California Central Coast with her husband, a cattle dog, a tabby cat, three goats and five chickens. When she is not writing poetry she likes to practice yoga, swim, garden and enjoy the beauty of the place she calls home.
The Marbled Sigh 