With small confidence in skill, tackle, gear,
years upstream of us, inattentive
and restless to renounce
everything we might have failed
to remember - on that day
of more than ordinarily dank sun,
thigh-deep in the familiar river
in which we no longer believed,
each of us pointed out to the other
where at the pool's head had occured
one tiny rise - upon which came another,
more vigorous, and another, and so on, until
before long the river from bank to bank was lively
with splashes to a hatch
of little yellow mayflies,
which at this time of the afternoon at this time
of year, we ought to have
expected, and to which short and late
we cast, raising at once three
minor trout, then waded ashore to rest
in the strangeness it was to have undertaken
out of little hope the old rubric,
and by the agitations of the inert surface
to have been restartled.
~ John Engels
About John Engels
John Engels has taught English Literature at
St. Michaels's College in Winooski, Vermont for many years. He
is the author of five books of poetry, including The Homer
Mitchell Place, Vivaldi in Early Fall, and Weather-Fear, for
which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is recognized
as one of America's finest poets. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.
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