Fishing in the Dark
       

The Mississippi night begins to pale
above the pond, a tonsured round still and black
beneath the cryptic pines and dying stars.
He casts a line into the dark and waits

for what he cannot see—the languid bluegill
wheeling in the gloom like a mobile made
of spoons and knives, like shards of sky that glint
below the murk. On shore, crickets shrive

the dawn, and splinters of birdsong fall
helter-skelter from the trees, the world
unbound and blank as morning mist. Soon,
he'll watch a turtle slide from deadwood,

head west across the pond, and drag the sun
above the ragged pines. His bobber drifts
then dips, awaits the tug and strike that weds
the fish to man, that man to fractured sky.

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Copyright © 2015 Rob Griffith All rights reserved
from New Madrid
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission