CRESCENT POND
last summer
Skipper, Dave, and I hiked
through patches of alders
like barbed wire,
meandered across a marsh
around pitcher plants
filled with last night's rain
to Crescent Pond as we often did
when I was a boy,
much like old times,
since some things don't change,
not much anyway
and in an August morning,
with few trout but more than enough
mosquitoes, and a breeze
that held the sun lightly
we recalled how thirty-five years ago
Dave filled in for Skipper (his foot in a cast
after falling off the roof of the mill),
and filled his Rambler with me,
my brother, Cec, Terry, and Jean-Guy
from East Angus, outside Sherbrooke,
outside Montreal, on an exchange visit
to get to know Newfoundlanders
and knit better relations
between French and English Canadians
(I don't think the exchange worked)
and we fished all day in the pond
like an arc of the moon
where trout grow lunatic and fat
since nobody can find them
and now I've returned
to Crescent Pond with Skipper and Dave,
in their mid-seventies, friends almost
all their lives, with only a few words spoken,
still trout fishing in the pond
that seems the same
and I haven't thought about Jean-Guy
for years, don't seem to recall much
in the busyness of this life
that knows little constancy
and we don't catch many trout,
but I taste the rhythms of casting a line
akin to writing a poem,
and I grow still, present for a while
but now spinning in winter, faraway,
Carrie calls with more bad news,
Dave might have cancer,
and I must remember all the hikes
to Crescent Pond, want fullness
of memory and hope,
need to fill my lungs
with airsome memories
like the full moon's breath,
need to remind Dave and Skipper,
the trout are still waiting
just below the surface,
always both transparent and opaque