"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.

"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.

"The Trout" by Amy Lowell

Naughty little speckled trout,

Can’t I coax you to come out?
Is it such great fun to play
In the water every day?
Do you pull the Naiads’ hair
Hiding in the lilies there?
Do you hunt for fishes’ eggs,
Or watch tadpoles grow their legs?
Do the little trouts have school
In some deep sun-glinted pool,
And in recess play at tag
Round that bed of purple flag?
I have tried so hard to catch you,
Hours and hours I’ve sat to watch you;
But you never will come out,
Naughty little speckled trout!

"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.

"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.

"The Drunken Fisherman" by Robert Lowell

Walking on Water – Waves (Pulverized Azurite and Malachite on polished Gesso Canvas, 7‘x11’)

by Makoto Fujimura

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whisky bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher's sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term...
On water the Man-Fisher walks.

"The Drunken Fisherman" by Robert Lowell, from Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. © 1976, 1977.

"The Trout," by Amy Lowell

Naughty little speckled trout,
Can’t I coax you to come out?
Is it such great fun to play
In the water every day?
 
Do you pull the Naiads’ hair
Hiding in the lilies there?
Do you hunt for fishes’ eggs,
Or watch tadpoles grow their legs?
 
Do the little trouts have school
In some deep sun-glinted pool,
And in recess play at tag
Round that bed of purple flag?
 
I have tried so hard to catch you,
Hours and hours I’ve sat to watch you;
But you never will come out,
Naughty little speckled trout!

"For the Trout," by Greg Keeler

I       Cutthroat You were here first. I can see why in the way the rivers don't rob you of what the streams gave. The dim rosettes on your sides live behind your spots in another time as if Lewis and Clark were still planning to meet near water and would never stop. And the thin orange slashes on your throat will always be proof. No matter how the world may crowd toward the hybrid of loss they will be there. Your gill covers burn crimson toward purple as you flaunt the purity of the West spilling east from the divide and a world lost in you.

II           Brook You live hard, in the backwater and eddies where your flesh turns like coal into diamond and you burn orange up the flare of your fins for your own reason The tracks stunning your back into dark marble are where we would go in sleep if dream were water. Since it's not we rely on you to show us the way east. When you find size in still waters, four pounds draped over a purist's hand, it leaves no choice: Plato was wrong. All of the West was wrong. This living shadow burns, has weight.

III            Brown You have come a long way -- and stayed. Still you seem willing to put up with us When we take your water away, slow it down, turn it warm, your jaw gets more determined with each fall spawning -- and you grow. We call you brown and your red spots defy us, floating on brown glowing gold turning purple or turquoise when you flop on the grass. Your teeth turn inward sharp down your throat so nothing you catch can escape you.

IV          Rainbow Running against the line you are the promise. Where the brown dives, you leap. And there in the sun, above the circle of your entrance into this world, you let us know for one instant what you know. And there is nothing in the color of sun through water that could spell promise so clearly. On shore your colors go quickest of all. Unless we lose you now we will lose you always.

"The Trout," by James Laughlin

A trout let us say

a blue blonde trout

     that slips through

     the bars like water

from boite to boite

from man to man but

     only ones she likes

     and almost never for

money and I love she

says I love exagger-

     ate and her mother

     asked the neighbors

qu’est-ce que j’ai

fait au ciel pour

     avoir une fille qui

     est de l’ordure and

she came back from

the palaces of the

     king’s cousin out in

     Siam where they ate

off gold plates and her

whim was his com-

     mand came back to the

     bars and the boys and

the slow swim through

the dim light yes a

     trout let us call her

     a small blond trout.