Ponds West of Town

Saint Paul, 6 November 2005

For Montana Poet, Artist, & Raconteur, Greg Keeler

Anglers jimmy-twist trout with Brooklyn accents

Wrench them from tanks fidgety with noxious bobbers

Bereft of flies hand-tied by mercenary tourists

K-Mart stores erupt from sienna valleys

Like knapweed punches empty blacktop

Casting us to the leafy spurge of gentility

Exhibit A is the barbed hook detritus of dreams

A rip-rap of unspooled six pound test

Slick and shiny from a slurry of bird-pecked baits

Trout-farmed cherubs detonate the surface

Crippled by the odd eyeball gone missing

Ogling us from the sockets of unfilled shot glasses

Mottled in the liquor of false promises

Cairns of pigment define the foreground

A pallette thinned from swigs of George Dickel

And you, slumped in a feeble lawn chair

Cussing crankbaits, hoisting lunkers with a poleax

I fished those ponds west of town

Made famous by your poem

Each year I return to the same places

You’ve been fishing all along