As Long as There Are Brook Trout.

Nickel, Matthew

As Long as There Are Brook Trout
Bowman Creek, Northeast Pennsylvania
(For HRS)

   Somewhere holding steady
   along the old railroad bed
   toward North Mountain, hemlocks
   shade the rock cliffs, moss drips
   and springs feed the current

   I'm driving a twenty-two year old
   Chevy Suburban the same one my father
   took me fishing in as child; it still smells
   like him, his bad breath, and I fear being
   damned to enact the same old memories;

   but my pilgrimage up the mountain
   is an act of rebellion--fishing trips are often
   rebellious in nature, revelatory in kind--
   I think driving up steep curves how
   maybe this is the last hill this old truck

   will climb to die on Bowman Creek
   but then I find the place, smell the air.
   It's always the way the air smells
   on a mountain trout stream--
   thinking: as long as there are brook trout

   everything in life will be right.
   Springs wet the rocks on the far side
   dropping into a channel dark and deep
   and suddenly a flash surfaces: ripples gone;
   I think: salvelinus fontinalis, brook trout

   springing from the fountains of salvation,
   when the spring begins to sing my heart is still.
   I fish all afternoon, deep toward sundown
   kneeling in the stream casting air-thin
   monofilament into high arcs, slanted light

   threading channels by fingers--suddenly
   dozens of lacewings drop circles open
   my worm drifts and the line
   jumps faint again taut misses the
   unmistakable dance of enticement

   is he enticing me, I think, then pull hard,
   a flash of sunset on belly of brook trout,
   the line draws, jerks, and before I know
   that he has thrown the hook
   I hear a strange sound above

   crystalline song of the hermit thrush,
   hail holy throat, singing the springs,
   the bleeding fountain of all loss and joy.
   Later I bring in a twelve inch brown,
   but the birds don't sing, lacewings gone

   and I feel somehow a failure on this quest
   or maybe it's what Saint Francis called
   perfect joy, the knowledge after nightfall's
   empty catharsis that somewhere hope
   still flashes beneath current swirl

   a glimpse of bright orange holding
   light spots on a dark background,
   the maps of the world in its becoming
   or however McCarthy wrote it.
   It is a long road we take to find the

   fountain of healing and only certain people
   understand what a brook trout means
   and how the chaos of the world
   finds order in a pattern of circles
   holding steady somewhere in mountains.