Literary Lode DEPARTMENT
Summer Poems BY B.J. BUCKLEY
THE MISSOURI AND MATISSE
NIGHT FISHING
There's a floating borderland between light going down to darkness and the humming rise of insects into the drift currents of cool wind over water,
over this lake which holds the world mirrored perfectly: dry hills, sage, drowned cottonwoods, the buoyant angler
whipping the wild horses of the air with a supple rod –
with the merest flick of the wrist fly poised
on the surface before sinking in a soft spiral bottomward, where hunger follows, where the eye cannot.
The strike, when it comes, is quick
hard down,
an elephantine pull, an ache –
a sudden nothing. Whatever it was
that leapt out of the dark water wearing fish flesh and haloed in the moon, that swallowed the mayfly's dance then hung
by threads of starlight weightless in the still air, and fell,
a streak of silver comet-sure back into rippling heaven, cannot be betrayed
by naming, though it named me: Cast-Away, Night-Fisher,
Ghost-in-the-Shallows – I am trying to learn to walk like water.
26
Cut-out clouds a stripe of blue the scissors of vision precise:
Missouri Breaks like the pale cliffs of Dover in a circus of beautiful light –
snip out a bird
purple bird thousand
swallows nesting in soft
escarpments all the curves curls currents arranged off kilter
yellow rubber (the rapids) raft and some fish
finny fellows in fine quick
fettle one here
silver there one arcing
an orange Moon.
DISTINCTLY MONTANA • SUMMER 2012
