.
Gorge
Millennia before the Bass Pro tours,
Sonar fish finders and electric reels,
Some unsung pioneer dreamed baits and lures,
Felt in his blood how landing lunkers feels.
The knuckle dragger took a piece of bone,
Slivered it down to a promising size,
Fashioning gorge and braid all on his own,
And hauled in a flathead to whoops and cries.
Fast forward to our present, humdrum day:
We cast, our only catch a cigarette…
At least we’re out of our better half’s way:
We are his legacy, we’re in his debt.
.
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Stephen M. Dickey is a Slavic linguist at the University of Kansas. He has published widely on Slavic verbal categories, and has published translations of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian fiction and poetry including Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish, Borislav Pekić’s How to Quiet a Vampire, and Miljenko Jergović’s Ruta Tannenbaum. He has published poetry in various journals including Shot Glass Journal, Trinacria, The Lyric, Rat’s Ass Review, Lighten Up Online, Better Than Starbucks, Asses of Parnassus, and Blue Unicorn.
For a sequel, you could add ‘the den’ to fishing as an escape from ‘her indoors’ as we say in Britain, a term for which I got much berated the other day.
Very humorous, Stephen.
Fishing is great for many reasons–meditation and getting out of the way–among the best of them. Always ask the wife to make supper anyway, just in case the fish are not biting. You may be closer than others think to the origination of fishing that may have included getting out of the cave.
Paul and Roy, thank you both for your comments.
Part of the motivation for writing this was the experience I have had for over a couple of decades of driving out to the local reservoir on coldish, windy days when no anglers’ boats are out, and there’s always some solitary guy standing on the rocky shore fishing. I’ve never seen one of them get a strike; I came the conclusion that they are just out there getting away from something.
I like the double play on the title, which captures your penchant for detailed precision in your verse. You manage to compress millennia into three stanzas with a tone of humorous nostalgia, balancing satire with reverence. From our perspective of modern decline, we are indeed indebted to this unknown ‘knuckle dragger.’
Thank you for your generous comments, Andrew. I do like looking back into the mists of pre-time.
I like the fishing vocabulary, Stephen. You’ve packed in as many specialized words as tokens the man could pin onto his bucket. Or do you have another name for yours?
Thanks Margaret.
On my trips, buckets are mere buckets.
You have inspired me to write poems about fishing, my second love after brutish Spartan women, who embolden me to write verses from the heart. I fish, collect, build and restore many things related to fishing. I often wonder what the great egret is thinking when he watches me from afar with a baited handline.
Delighted to hear it.
It’s not poetry, but here is my translation of my favorite quote on fishing, from Meša Selimović’s novel “The Fortress”:
‘Mula Ibrahim gave me this advice:
“Why don’t you go fishing? It seems like complete folly, which it is, but it becomes one’s greatest passion. And it protects a man from his own follies. The world can come crashing down, and you’ll be standing there motionless, staring into the water. The purest act of wisdom in a man’s life is to find the right folly. If those in power had any sense, they would tell everyone: grab your rod, get to the river and fish! There would be no rebellions, no disorder. So I’m telling you: go fishing, Ahmet Šabo!”’
This poem is not only about fishing, it is also about the origin of technology. I have fished and waited, but I have also fished and caught. When I lived on the Blue River in the mountains of eastern Arizona, I would wrap a good length of monofilament line around a piece of deer antler and let my baited hook drift toward a “hole” where hungry trout were lurking. I rarely came home without a nice string of rainbows. In those days it was no folly.