COLD WATER
I step around a gate of bushes in the mess and trickle of a damned 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.
Annonymous
======================================================== Jimmy D. Moore - Scout Exec. BSA (Ret.)
Humorist, half-assed poet, carmudgeon and sometimes red-neck Texan.
"Being able to read trout streams is just as valuable to a fly fisherman as the ability to read a defense is to an NFL Quarterback."
Jimmy D. Moore - � [2004] ========================================================
