Fly-Craft
I imagine you beginning
to tie this season’s flies, your
eyes squinting at the splash
of lamplight, the tiny vice
and militant hook, a surgeon’s
deliberate fingers. Already
dreaming of mercy, catch
and release, you are patient
with pliers, miniature
snips and whip finisher,
the instruments arrayed
on a table with medical care,
line slender as an optical
nerve. Did you test every thread
and feather for weight and wind
resistance? Somewhere brown
trout are sleeping. Rainbows
and brookies drift, resting up
for the lunge at living wings,
the Mayflies’ dart and flitter
you mimic with fine artifice.
Beginning and end, the world
comes down to this – shadowed
light across water, a regimen
embellished with whim.
In your unflinching grace
I imagine the essential Vermeer,
his passion for precision,
his perfect maker of lace.
Your life comes down to this,
stitch by blessed stitch,
all in practice for the cast
and that single splendid leap
into the light, out of the wily deep.