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