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| CORMORANT | ||
| Black slash of bird, you slip the rippled surface
like a spilled thing. Lifting or landing, your plumage folds and fans slick as the gears of an oiled clock. The lake, your playground. Your feathers shine. Your skin stays dry. I aim the binoculars bill-high. Mornings, I’ve seen you throng docks. Wing-spread, you lift light bones showing sun wet feathers, waiting awhile for warmth as if after you dry you might not disappear to another fish-plunge, tunneling far from our anxiety. We watch with unease your exit. How like our lives. Always a question. We see you then, briefly, dark curl of muscle and thrust and just as you come into focus: dive! Ripples widen, and we’re left guessing. Where next? The hidden swim alone. The surface gasp. |
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| ON MERE POINT | ||
| Casting off the dock for stripers I think of my father's stories— fishing for walleye at Sioux Lookout. The day a snapper ate his catch, strung and struggling below the pier. My hands feel for the telltale take and I have to laugh. How two men tooled of the same line can argue themselves to silence, watch reels unravel in a flickering tangle. My lure lifts in air from one phase of the moon to the other side of the tide. We toss these baits in frail hope that one dark mouth will take the hook, end up caught in a cold bucket of lost talk. Gravity sucks barbs below the surface. As if the whole journey was about the tug of men and teeth to the trophy end, as if—standing on this Maine spit—it was only about one damn word we could put our fingers to and simply win with the crimp of a hissing drag. As if we don't swim the same current: rod-stiff—muscles tense and failing—until that glossy pose, the wide stilled eye. |
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| TOURIST CANOE | ||
| Always like this: the thunk of paddle on gunwale. Lifted wood turns pond drip to ripples, and the glide of the curved bow spears the surface in a silent vee your pressed blade makes. This is you alone, your body levering the boat ahead, hull lightly rolling with your tensed weight, your hips pleased with the lean and lull of the shell on clear water, the slow shift of far-off shore. In the bow, a bag of rock for balance. The surface resists your sink with its thick flared palm, your float: this delicate measure of spread and pressure. Below your stroke, boulders sit deep in the green murk, glacial remains dragged and dropped with an age that makes you afraid. This is you alone, skimming the surface again with the flexed effort your body allows, mere feet from the cold underneath the lake shows freely. This is you seeing the dark salmon back flicker in a tease across the rock you fear, the fish slack and still for a moment in the cold lake, the long body, a hover mid-water unimpressed below your blackness before a gill-flare and a rippled fin tip you off to the swift single surge of the gone fish, leaving you adrift with your lean and your look, your shadow, the paddle, your stiff imitation. |
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| CONTRIBUTOR | ||
| Andrew Gottlieb lives and writes in Seattle where he most recently taught creative writing at the University of Washington and has received grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle Arts Commission. His writing has appeared in many journals including the American Literary Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Poets & Writers. |
