My father in the aluminum stern, cursing
another fouled blood-knot: all the shits
and fucks as integral to the art of fishing
as the bait-fish, little silver smelts
I sewed like a manual transmission,
the same inbred order and precision
needling the leader through the ass,
out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril
and back down — suffering as my father suffered
the bastard no-see-ums and the guttering Johnson
the obligatory dud, orange egg-pearls
ballooning from its bust underside, hundreds of duds
like every shit-luck setback that drove us on,
fed by the huge image of everything
we'd never caught, moving in joint blindness
under Munsungun.
And whatever it was
it was the fight that delivered us — a tension
like a sequestered muscle, the line
spooling, unspooling, the holy-shit-
litany pulled from our awed mouths
contracting with distance until a whole
silence surfaced, the viscid, slapping body
absorbing and reflecting raw light
like the bit of cornea above a pupil.
And then his tremendous, decent hands
brandishing an oar-butt; the brilliant lace
of the gills, their crumpled hinge flaring
in bilge water; and the line, whipping
and shuttling, feeding invisibly back,
moving on on Munsungun, sons
survived by the same damn hunt they heired.