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