For Ethan Canin

I held the rod with both my hands
and reeled her in with steady drag.
I felt the force inside the line
like a current without the shock.

The surface was a rebus where
I saw myself at a certain slant,
then only dark where the mirror broke
beneath my face. A fish of trout

shone beneath, then disappeared
without a trace. It was that life
that I desired and therefore imagined,
a way to live inside the lake,

a way to fly and breathe the water,
a way to swim and turn like that.
Starving men report the powers
of desperate species granting wishes,

of talking mackerel teaching them
how hunger feeds itself, how nothing
lasts the way you think it will.
You do not want what you finally have.

I pulled her in and struck her head
with the paddle edge against the gunwale
until she twitched with only nerves,
then flipped around a few more times

before she lay outstretched and still
like the silver tongue of a god who lied.
I cut her open to find the hook
that she had swallowed, still coiled in worm,

then cleaned her guts in the lucid water.
I thought of things that I might want
but knew no wish was greater then
than the trout herself, caught and cut.