"Borderline" by JYA

Casting a fly into the sun on the water.
Something shifts
on the glimmering edge of vision.
A shoreline emerges, becomes
the way that beckons,

the journey and the destination,

the light that opens,

a looping, lightshot world of its own,

the borderline between worlds

that cannot be parted.

Small trout flash there
gathering up light

rise by rise by rise,

taking the world
on their bright shoulders and,

with the fulcrum of their vibrant life,

turning it round

and round.

"Images of the West: The Silence of Art" by James R. Hepworth

Images of the West: The Silence of Art

On poetry and fly fishing

Written by James R. Hepworth  
March 2010

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SO MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about fly fishing and about poetry — and so little of it written well — that writing about poetry and fly-fishing should count as an easy task, yet neither the art of fly-fishing nor the art of poetry require much discussion. Both are best practiced in silence.

We all know this, yet few of us practice the art of silence well, either.

Read more.

"Twilight" by JYA

The lake rises and falls in long cool breaths.
An eagle skims the last glow of sunset,

folds itself into a shadow of pines.
Loons call down the darkness.

A flurry of bats flits out the last light.
Ducks rush overhead with

a sound like tearing velvet.
Stars pour down, and trout

pluck them from
the still surface

one by one.

"Intimations of Mortality" by JYA

An August evening on the lake.

All seems calm, but
everything is hurtling at breakneck speed
through time and space.

Each day dies a little more;
each coming of summer dark presages

the onset of the season of darkness.

The trout know, and rush to intercept

the swirling fragments of life that will

stave off starvation in the dark time.

They fight the hook, struggle frantically

to reenter their element, to obey the instinctive drive

not for freedom
but for time, precious time.

I fish calmly in the middle of it all,

going a thousand miles an hour.

"Looking for Water" by John Engels

Wild Turkeys in Flight -- Photo by Coy Hill

A river is supposed to be nearby, and reachable,

and since in a strange place the first thing

is to look for running water, I ask, and discover

that no one knows exactly

where the river is, though

there's plenty of speculation.

They think it might be somewhere back below

where the hiking trails used to run,

beyond the old bridle paths, probably

overgrown by now, as they recall, a difficult

tangle of distance over steep descents

through grapevine, blackberry, alder hells.

I have to make my own way, following

in the hardening red clay the beautiful tridental tracks

of what turn out to be a dozen

wild turkeys that a scant ten yards ahead

take wing in the watery dusk,

flap up and glide back over the road, slow

as big, bronze, iridescent fish,

the whole time wind like a minor surf,

and while I'm still breathing hard, six deer

exactly the color of hickory startle and crash off

through a sudden general reddening of the day,

and staring after them I see

a white gleam through the trees,

not the river, but a headstone--I've come

on an old graveyard,

where the turkeys must just

have been feeding, and the deer

running through, leaping headstones

of Cheatham and Goode, Asleep

in Jesus, and the Glasgow sisters, dead

at ten and two and eight,

reason enough to give up and head back,

and I'm home after dark

where a globed lamp in the farthest dip of the lawn

I mistake for the moon on water.

Excerpt from Big Water, Lyons & Burford, New York, N. Y., 1995.

"Fishing By Moonlight" by JYA

Though I am very late,

the lake is waiting for me.

A bright trout comes to the fly,

goes back in the water

taking the light with him.

Then the moon,

brushing out of the pines,

casts its glow on the lake.

I drift, fly drifts

down silver streams of night.

A shining trout pulls on the line,

lets go.

I nod back:

Yes; time to be on my way. 

The moon leads me home.

"Angling Reveries" by C.N. Ward

"Evening Fireside Stories" by Louis Rhead, 1914

From Fisherman's Verse, compiled by Williams Haynes and Joseph LeRoy Harrison.

Duffield and Company, New York, 1919.

"Summer Solstice" by JYA

The wind sweeps across the water, strains against the ridge as though to tip the balance

as the earth begins its tilt away from the sun. The lake on which I float shifts with the earth.

Trout stay deep in the slow slip of current.

A dark shape on the water: a cicada struggling to stay in the light.

I find its image in the fly box, cast it out among the waves. It bobs and drifts.

A riffle breaks, bends, comes together again, as a fish rises, but not to the fly.

I lift the fly, give it to the wind again. It drops, dimples the water, bobs and drifts.

The wind persists; its breath is cold. I take out a jacket. The unattended fly slowly follows

the arc of the line as I spin in the wind. With one arm in a sleeve I hear the take,

look up to see the line straightening, lift the rod,

and a trout breaks into the light.

The net gathers it in, and an ancient, timeless circle is formed, linking hunter and prey,

hope and fulfillment. The fish twists in the net, twists off the hook,

 uses the fulcrum of my grip to lever itself free.

And the circle is complete.

The wind steps back, and night slowly fills its place. Darkness settles on the water,

smooths it to an ebony sheen. Fish trace circles on its surface.

I cast out a caddis, and a trout scribbles at the fly and is caught.

I draw it out and the last light runs down its sides.

I trace my own circle and then straighten for shore. Behind me the darkness presses close,

but before me the western sky still casts a glow, silvering the ripples of my passing.

Time is passing, too, with every chime of every frog,

with each tick of a bat’s teeth on my trailing line.

The day sinks out of sight.

"Fishing" by A. E. Stallings

Photo from The Female Angle

The two of them stood in the middle water,

The current slipping away, quick and cold,

The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,

Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.

Maybe he regretted he had brought her—

She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—

Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.

Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:

To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails

And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.

And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales

Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,

Life and death weighed in the shining scales,

The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

Brook Trout

I'm thinking of Brook Trout these days. I've been inspired by Brk Trt over at Small Stream Reflections. He fishes some beautiful little streams and regularly posts photos of gorgeous Brookies.

There is a little lake near Trout Lake (there's a string of four lakes in that valley) that is stocked with Brook Trout each Spring. I plan to be there soon after the season opens. Later, so I've been told, one can catch nice Brookies in the outlet stream that cuts through the pines and willows below the lake.

I went to that lake a few years ago, and I remember I caught some Brook Trout, but after an extensive search of my photos I was unable to find any Brook Trout. It may have been so long ago I was still fishing without a camera. So, if you would be so kind, Brk Trt, I'd like to use one of your photos to go along with this poem. Thanks.

 

Speckled Trout

by Ron Rash

Water-flesh gleamed like mica:

orange fins, red flankspots, a char

shy as ginseng, found only

in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear

of faraway creeks no map

could name. My cousin showed me

those hidden places. I loved

how we found them, the way we

followed no trail, just stream-sound

tangled in rhododendron,

to where slow water opened

a hole to slip a line in,

and lift as from a well bright

shadows of another world,

held in my hand, their color

already starting to fade.

"Twilight," by Jim Yaussy Albright

Twilight.
The lake rises and falls in long cool breaths.
An eagle skims the last glow of sunset,
folds itself into shadowy pines.
Loons call down the darkness.
A flurry of bats flits out the last light.
Ducks rush overhead with a sound like tearing velvet.
Stars pour down, and
trout pluck them from the surface
one by one.


From Celebration of Trout.

"In Answer to Amy's Question What's a Pickerel," by Stanley Plumly

Pickerel have infinite, small bones, and skins
of glass and black ground glass, and though small for pike
are no less wall-eyed and their eyes like bone.
Are fierce for their size, and when they flare
at the surface resemble drowning birds,
the wing-slick panic of birds, but in those
seconds out of water on the line,
when their color changes and they choose for life,
will try to cut you and take part of your hand
back with them. And yet they open like hands,
the sweet white meat more delicate in oil,
to be eaten off the fire when the sun
is level with the lake, the wind calm,
the air ice-blue, blue-black, and flecked with rain.

"In Answer to Amy's Question What's a Pickerel" by Stanley Plumly, fromThe Marriage in the Trees. © The Ecco Press, 1997. 

"Cold Water," by Donald Hall

I step around a gate of bushes
in the mess

and trickle of a dammed stream

and my shoe fills with cold water. I

enter the shade

of a thicket, a black pool,

a small circle of stunned drowsing air,

vaulted with birch which meets overhead

as if smoke

rose up and turned into leaves.

I stand on the roots of a maple

and imagine

dropping a line. My wrist jumps

with the pain of a live mouth hooked deep,

and I stare, and watch where the lithe stripe

tears water.

Then it heaves on my hand; cold,

squaretailed, flecked, revenant flesh

of a Brook Trout.

The pine forests I walked through

darken and cool a dead farmer’s brook.

I look up and see the Iroquois

coming back

standing among the birches

on the other side of the black pool.

The five elders

have come for me, I am young,

my naked body whitens with cold

in the snow, blisters in the bare sun,

the ice cuts

me, the thorns of blackberries:

I am ready for the mystery.

I follow them

over the speechless needles

of pines which are dead or born again.

Anticipating