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The Faith of Fishermen J I M WAYNE MILLER What they see when they go down to the base of the dam in rubber suits, with helmets, air lines and weighted shoes to inspect the twenty-six gates and clear away debris—what they see, the divers say we wouldn't believe: catfish (they shake their heads remembering ), catfish lying like logs around those gates, up close against the concrete, catfish with heads as big as buckets ("We don't mess with 'em!"), eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty-pounders, yellow eyes that glow in the underwater beam. But we believe. The divers are our priests. Ours is the faith of fishermen eager for any authoritative word. We need to know wonders are still alive at the base of the steel and concrete world we've made—a yellow-eyed whiskered wildness, something old and other, akin to what we feel, powerful, cold, living in the dark around the gates that regulate the rivers of our lives. From The Brier Poems (1997) 334 ...

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