Vietnam

The shape of it bending like an eel

or disfigured quarter moon, pink and green

and brown, like a rainbow trout. The wall

along my bed covered with the map I cut

from the newspaper, and next to it the fishing

calendar from Abonauder’s Texaco. The square

cages of days with their numerals and effigies

of moon and fish shaded to indicate the shape

of the moon, the hunger of the fish.

The white bread stripped of its crust, dampened,

then dusted with flour, compressed into a tight ball,

wrapped in foil and chilled all night.

A piece of it pressed and shaped on the tip

of an Eagle Claw hook, then lowered into the nesting holes

of blue gill. The plastic bobber floating

on the surface like a silent doorbell. A whole world

of cause and effect, framed day-by-day and week-by-week.

The passage of time as a kind of game in which

I transferred numbers from the newspaper

to the calendar. The body counts and their categories

of NVRA, Marines, Montagnards.

And each morning I put a bold X through the previous

day not to erase or forget it but to connect

the corners, make four triangles of the square.

And it was rare if not impossible to catch

the blue gill that swam and swam around

the tidy pebble craters of their nests,

or coax them out except in hostile swerves

and feints toward the bait that hung

like a balloon of gravity over their homes,

a suspicious egg pouch or cocoon, something

a storm might have dislodged from the bank

and blown like a feared gift into the water,

a thing swallowed whole then run with

until the line played out and the hook set fast.

Source: The Neighbor (1995)