Trout

Trout

We’ll get away

I wonder who knows the way?

The sun will come down from its pulpit

with its red

                                red

                                                red

                                                                cassock

slowly

dissolving

over the boulevard with its open heart.

                                                                                Juan Felipo Herrera

                                                                                Exile Boulevard

But we weren’t clever enough to go

together

were we, out

of that place.  We waited and maybe

the first ten to twelve

years, though we never really left

one another, we never really

strayed entirely
together.  Even when  you count

the long walks picking up rocks

we’d throw
back

into the water (remember sometimes

we’d stuff our pockets

and walk down to low tide just

to throw them in?)

or trout fishing, all the small ones

got another chance

even if their gills were ripped

(you always seemed to be

in a  hurry somehow though I never

knew where you hurried to)

and a lot of times you’d just give in

and give it all to me

rod and trout and wriggle

and walk off in the tall pond grass,

your sneakers sneaking

and smooching and then one day

you were gone too long

and after I found you

sitting loose as pocket change

taking on the sun

with your bare chest and a stack

of the biggest

trout I’d ever seen

you catch, maybe, your going

off alone like that

was when we started to part

ways and by then you were taller

than I was and could see

over the grass

and all I had was a path

and my feet to see them on

and I knew one day

if I started following you

I’d lose the way

and you’d be gone to me anyway

and eventually the hard way

took us both but not

in any way you’d recognize

today doing the way you do.

Eventually we both had to be

those gill-ripped trout gaping

in the mud of that pond you walked

off into

in your mind

and sank (I can at least imagine

that) gasping always,

staring like the dead do

like the living dead do when 

they're tired, and unrescued.