FISHTHOUGHTBLOOD JON BOLDUC
When I was a boy,
Father taught me to ice-fish.
Here’s a memory;
Father drills a hole,
the auger bounces, vibrates, roars,
shaving ice– soon
the blade connects with winter water,
–the engine fades off.
I fish floating ice chunks from the hole with a skimmer
while
Father sets the trap, ties the sinker, and hooks the minnow
thru its side.
He lowers the line
gently into the fishhole; the bait plunges to the lakebed.
Father reels up the slack, pitches the three legged trap
above the exposed black water
and we wait for a trout, or a snarled toothed pickerel.
Father,
I have learned
to fish for thoughts
with an ice–trap. When the flag
springs up, I reel
slippery ideas up from deep darkness.
As they flop, I pull the hook out from their lips,
knock them in the head,
throw them in a pail; gut them, I spill fishthoughtblood on the white snow.
After the low sun sets,
My friends and I fry caught fishthoughts
in my dim cabin.
Hughes, Plath, Ginsberg, and Eliot
talk around the fireplace
as the pan sizzles, as the oil jumps. Soon
we feast on flakey poemfillets;
we talk about the dark english rain,
the crowded zoos, electroshock therapy, bald mediocrity.
After we have eaten
and finished the wine,
and all my friends have gone home
I look down at empty plates
and somehow,
“the page is printed.”