Bullheads

Michael Metivier   

We take more than our share,

Several dozen from the star-

Flecked cove of a red maple

Pond, fins tapered like steeples,

Gill to gill in the bucket

And bilge, drawn from a thicket

Of drowned roots

Into the night’s cool garrotes.

Sorrowful brothers

Choking on strange ethers,

Striving, eager, bent

Toward the sky by want:

It was not to be, this breathing,

Though not for nothing.

 Love this poem! I grew up on bullheads. Dad would clip a round red & white plastic bobber to my line and I would do my best to cast five feet from the muddy shore of a Mississippi oxbow just outside of Wilton Junction, Iowa. I had already threaded a wiggly garden worm on the Eagle Claw hook. Wouldn't take us long to have a sack full of brownish black fish headed home for dinner. Mom would heat the grease while Dad nailed them into a big maple tree by the fence in the back yard and skinned them. My job was hosing them clean with the garden hose. Good times and good food.