Fish Stories
Sometimes I let them go. Sometimes when I am
waiting on the banks of my desk, my mental line
casting out into the muddy spaces, I suddenly feel
a tug on the slack, and something bobs on either
side of my consciousness. Quick. Nothing more
than a word or a phrase. Less even. The shadow
suggested by a word. And in that moment, I know
that, if I start cranking, I can follow that hint, that
intuition until it is tired and lying dead on the page,
flat as a metaphor and ready to be skinned. And
part of me will dine upon it. And part of me will
hang it on the wall. And the rest of me will start
to tell the story, revising as I go, because we all
like the ones we fought for the most. We all like
to think of the work as so hard and our efforts so
impressive, but the interesting poems are the ones
we let go. The interesting poems are still shadows.
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