I used to love coming onto the dark pools
of the Thunder to find
a school of dace skittering
crazily along the surface, then everything
going still again, so that I knew
something big was at work, and it might pay me
to walk upstream and bait up a small hook with a tiny piece
of redworm and catch me a small dace and cut the tail off
and throw the rest back into the river where
it would turn and bump downstream along
the bottom giving back
little golden measures of light, then to thread
the chubtail onto a bigger hook and drift it
down into the pool and let it swing
in short silvery arcs, the sun meantime
rising higher, maybe a deerfly
buzzing in narrowing circles
around my head, the air
going heavy with the sweetness
of crushed ferns and warm hemlock.
But usually nothing
would happen, though once
in a while a big fish might flash
deep in the pool, or boil
at something I couldn't see, the thick back
porpoising, rise rings spreading
to splash the edges of the bank.
And always before I expected it
the sound of the woods would be rising
everywhere around me, the hour gone abruptly late
and dark having come on, wind
booming in the hemlocks
and behind me somewhere
where I'd never find them again
the runs and riffles of the Thunder
would come alive, the great pools
and oxbows flashing with big night-feeding
rainbows, swimming against the press
of the river, cavernously
gaping, flaring out ruffs
off scarlet gills, the water
storming about them, stony
in their throats, and the skin of the pools ashine
with schools of frenzied dace.
Exhausted, fly-bitten, muddy, hungry,
and sweating, I'd look up to see
nothing, no stars even, only the dark lock
and interlock of hemlocks - until
once on the road, I'd look up again and meet
the cool eye of the moon just
swum up from the deepest poolings of space,
for the rest of the night to poise itself directly
over wherever I might find myself
in my long walk home along Country Z,
to hold itself and head-on above me
huge in the huge current of the sky. ~John Engels