Go Fish
Woods were my father’s sanctuary. Where a small tributary trickled into the James River, he sat on the bank still as a monk, his fishing rod at attention. The line pierced the surface of the water, the worm lurked in the cool shallows. This is where the big bass fed.
I learned to be quite here. I was happy to sit near him, playing with the tin can of worms. He called me his Monkey-Doodle. His name was Oscar.
My father didn’t attend church, but his spirit was nourished in these woods just down the steep hill from Confederate breastworks. My brother and I used to find minnie balls in the thin summer grass. Near where my father fished, the Union Army built a pontoon bridge to cross the “rivah” to Richmond. The battle of Deep Bottom was fought on these banks. When my father fished here, it was silent enough to hear history.
Fifty years later I consider the silence, sanctuary, and stillness of those woods and know these conditions as essential in my writing life.
I’ve discovered a bridge between prayer, poetry and, yes, fishing. It is the bridge of Attentiveness. To attend, means to stretch. I don’t imagine attentiveness a languorous yawn, but a mentally and spiritually vigorous workout. My mentor, Jim Moore writes, “In sitting still, we are working.” He and my father are two of the most passionate sitter’s I’ve known.
Lu Chi, a Chinese writer of the third century composed Wen Fu: The Art of Writing. It is translated by Sam Hamill, and published by Milkweed Press, 1991.
It (writing) is like being adrift
in a heavenly lake,
or diving to the depths of the seas.
We bring up living words
like fishes
hooked in their gills
leaping from the deep.
One August morning, while mowing the lawn for my sixteenth birthday party, my father collapsed, and died two days later. Grief began to write for me, poems in green ink filled my notebook. I found an inner sanctuary where words insisted on their song, a sad song, but the voice continues.
I pull up lines, reel them in, tangled and slippery, and spread them out to make sense of them, or see if they make sense of me. This summer I will carry my writing self down to the French Broad River. You come too. Bait your mind with attention, and words will leap on the shore beside you, alive, radiant, singing.
Writer, go fish.
Requiem For Oscar
He grew up on a tobacco farm,
worked for Phillip Morris
and got all the cigarettes he could smoke
free. He was rarely without one
in the corner of his mouth,
or in his hand.
Two major heart attacks did not stop him.
A nurse found him standing on a toilet seat
blowing smoke into a vent.
I remember him being carried upstairs in a chair
by medics when he came home from the hospital.
He was not to climb hills,
or stairs,
or smoke.
He did all three.
He lived three years,
longer than predicted.
Why did he die so close to my sixteenth birthday?
So that grief would put words in my mouth?
Grief did. I wrote in green ink for a year.
My handwriting changed:
my letters, thick, round,
open, empty.