The World Is Round: Poems

Fishing Among the Learned

103 fIshInG amonG The learned i On the banks of her butterfly pond Grandmother would stand, as fluid as a waterfall, teaching with a five-and-dime pole in her hand, Be still and listen to that, she could be heard to say. She would make more good decisions, lose more control, gain, relinquish power, care about more people, recycle energy, discern more foolishness in an afternoon of fishing than Congress ever could be they all Democrat, all Republican. My first semesters ever were spent staring up at this Human University, shifting my weight from bamboo leg to trout flat foot, waving first cow fly then firefly from off her apron dress, listening to the sounds swelling around us, there was noise, there was instruction, there was a difference in the two. This kind of standing stare at still water; Fresh Water Philosophy, this speaking on the depths of a true life lived full; Saturday 104 Sociology, footprints baked into the soft bank; Advanced Lucy Geography. These outdoor lessons could go on for days and did, as long as there was sun and bait there was learning. To educate means to lead out, she whispered to me on the snakish road home. I had no idea what she was saying or why now. At well-lit nightfall in between the quiver of country bugs I’d wonder why she’d stood me there, that pole in my hand gripped tight as teeth full born to a jaw insisting, Girl, pond water is as good as any book. She’d already said to me in dreams, A good teacher can do more than talk about it, she can see it beyond the convincing skinny pages of any flattened tree. There on that bank preparing me for giant whales when she knew full well bream and mullet were all we had tugging our lines. You don’t fish just to catch, you fish so you can keep, so you can put something back, the fisherwoman taught. It has less to do with the fish and more to do with your line staying in the water, with your hand on the pole, with discerning rituals, sniffing out the weather, with what you can figure out about yourself that early in the quiet morning in between the iridescent help of sun or moon, in between the magnificent bites. 105 Know what you will not let corrupt you, that you cannot be bought or sold, assume another will come after you have gone, their own pole tight in hand as well hoping to catch something. Put something back whenever you can. Then she’d untie the hook from its mouth, lay it back in the soft velvet water, her fingers already asking forgiveness. Now that is something to keep. ii I cast out among the learned and teach to alter sleeping states. I stand before the university pond and fish for the living who send air bubbles up to the learned who know real life bestows no terminal degrees. I have come to know that we all dangle here, grub and silkworms alike casting out our many different lines. The well baited and the barely hooked while the new recruits watch, the old sentries look out silently. We push away from shore annually, calling our rolls like salmon, pole-vaulting, determined to remember the old ways to wisdom, do or die. Fishing is the key to everything that moves. A poet needs to fly-fish in the middle of the bluest grass in order to catch glimpses of the privileged information; that there are too many meetings and not enough conversations going on. A poet needs to stand girded before the 106 listening eyes of those who pay their hard-earned money wondering, Will I teach them anything that the world will later ask of them to be sure and know? I must. Inside the polished granite of academe a poet must hope beyond hope that we will all keep fishing at the bank and one day forgo the carnivorous weigh-in, the comparison of scales, and instead throw our prime catch back while keeping the feeling of casting out close. A poet invited to the marble table must cast out a cat gut cord, a thousand-pound live wire, with hook enough for all and reel in everything she sees and speak of the good with the bad and hope for the...