Early summertime offered time
fashioned by lengthier daylight
and temperate weather.
You and a friend of yours who
used to play university baseball,
used to be a big deal I hear,
hiked in with your fly fishing rods.
I didn’t have one—I still don’t,
and there’s no shame in that.
When we arrived at the top, at the lake basin,
clouds rolled in
and winds lashed the mountainsides.
You and your friend proceeded to fish anyways
in that wind.
Nestled between a family of boulders,
I wept bitterly as I spoke to God
about the circumstances that had brought me
to the very place I sat, pleading
for time to elapse irregularly,
for a navigable path,
for a damned fly fishing rod.
—N.A.
