and a son.
I, who am fixed
at 8 or 9 in their minds,
felt the coming divide,
felt the call of motion.
Trolling for long hours
lacked the draw
of activity--
the fisherman's patience
lost on young limbs,
like my lures
left above the lake's ivied banks.
I could never get the hang
of the direction
of the line,
would clot the reel
and feel a father's ire.
One father taught me to catch,
the other to clean.
It was the eyes
that scared me away then,
unreal fish eyes
looking like drops of blood.
And I, stilled if only for one
moment, suffered
the fish to writhe there:
the fish that might have risen,
transfigured,
that might have spoken,
that might have appeared as a man,
and I as a boy--
the perpetual child
of my fathers' remembering--
forced to see the truth,
that the scales must be removed
from the living.
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