Twilight of Ensuing Midnight

Saint Paul, 4 January 2005

A fortnight from the ice break

Cutthroat trout spawn in steely kinship

A male will nudge and glide across the female

Feathering still pockets of a stony watercourse

And quivering by arteries of backscattered light

Below the headwaters where a hallowed coulee calls

The yaw of continuity counterweights solitary clouds

Our drift boat lingers between clutches of minnows

Floating closer toward an itinerary of purpose

Until the Milky Way contacts the canyon wall

Catching a stonefly hatch entices us

Three miles to a moon and upstream into July

By late August the trout’s diet is sodden terrestrials

Ants bees and spiders hasten toward wicked chance

Until meaty grasshoppers are a September windfall

We are suspended in a sweet water colored wheat

Like a no limit harvest on non-native species

Or browns we coax from cutbanks with streamers

We're a fifer’s tune dancing a jig under a hunter’s moon

Discovering an abrupt twilight of an ensuing midnight