The Friendly Fisherman


You trolled towards shore
yanking me into the boat.
Your baited sweetness
made me leap.

You don't play like sportsmen.
You are brisk and purposeful.
I lie here content, trusting,
basking on deck.

So long, mysterious depths!
Murkiness subsides;
I flop towards this present
sunned by familiarity

Soon I'll die; we know that.
My skin will dry and flake.
Now, I'm gasping for minutes
built from every second.

I like this. The images are simple but the ideas are rich. To represent the life of a relationship as a fish caught from the sea is to flirt with cliché, but this is not one.

I like the idea of the fish (girl?) sunned by familiarity. It's an interesting contradiction that a fish would find the sunny deck of a boat familiar. Familiar because she has been pulled from the lake before?

The last verse is excellent. The idea that death will come soon can be read in various ways, and all of them work. Soon the relationship will die. Soon the actual person will die, perhaps due to illness or age. Soon we all will die, our time alive being so relatively short. I tend to read it as the impending death of a relationship, because the fish took a sweet bait, and a leap, and yielded to briskness and purposefulness. But any way I choose to read it, we are still "gasping for minutes/built from every second." To me the idea that seconds represent minutes for the gasping fish on the boat deck is about how when we realize our ephemeral nature we struggle to extend time through experience.

That's nice.

One nit: I do think the title is odd. It relieves my fear that all of this brisk and purposeful lack of sportsmanship might have a dark aspect to it, but it also sounds like the name of a seafood restaurant.

Deal Peilirojo:

This has been immensely useful feedback. I have needed some-- these poems do not do well in a vacuum. This is one of my first unrhymed poems. I'll change the title-- you are right about this. it is no longer about the fisherman so much as it is about the fish. I', amazed that so much of what i wanted to say came through; that is very heartening!

I may work on the passage about familiarity. Also, I was contrasting the sportsman with in implied sense that this was a commercial catch-- but you correctly showed me that "sportsman" could be seen in a different light.

I am grateful and will keep an eye open for your poems!

Elisabeth

elisabeth,

I think I may have confused you when I wrote about a lack of sportsmanship.

I did understand the sportsmen reference as a contrast to non-sport fishing, if not to commercial fishing. (The though of this being a commercial catch conjures up a whole other world of strange possibilities for the over-active imagination.) When I referred to lack of sportsmanship I meant the same thing, really. I did not mean it as "bad sport" kind of sportsmanship. Sport fisherman fish for fun and give the the fish a fighting chance I suppose, but this fisherman is mainly intent on landing the fish. He didn't want to play. He just wanted the fish. He didn't use dynamite, but he wasn't planning to catch and release, either. So I think I understood and that line works as written.

Well, as my son was a commercial fisherman in Maine for several years, where actually the ecological awareness is quite high among the locals, I have a gut reaction to sports fisherman as having their own agenda--a whole selection of biases and agendas that don't have to do with the poem now, though they did when i was focused on the fisherman rather than the fish in earlier versions. You do see it now as I intended it to be seen, but you should not have had to have had an explanation. I think I need to rethink this word and its implications. perhaps I need to refine the message further.

Again, I am amazed at the previous feedback I;ve been given here!