DRY CRIK Journal

                …to define an ideal as something you can’t
                possibly have but can’t possibly help wanting to have.
                          - Robert Frost (“The Claims of Poetry”)

Feet slipping slightly, slick
tennis shoes on mossy cobbles,
loose sand and gravel vacuumed beneath,
the current tugs heavily at blue jeans
in the Middle Fork of the Tule River
to balance swimming with placing
a Western Coachman against
a riffling dark cut bank. Upstream,
fly line lashed behind you sparking water drops
into the dawn streaking between pines
and cedars along a river strewn
with boulders roaring, casting into
blinding light, half-century back –
your silhouette remains impatient grace.

Packing our biggest rainbows home
in creels wrapped damp with ferns,
we paraded them as men -
as word spread like a rock ‘n roll
from cabin to cabin buzzing
from transistors. A decade later,
I brought you Kristofferson on vinyl
and you taught me instead
the philosophy of ‘catch and release’.
This is how it goes, looking back:
broad vectors swept into directions
running parallel with time – with the
music and the good sense to angle
towards words we can set free.

                                                    - for JEG