Valle Vidal

Like a cutthroat
in a meadow stream,
I look upstream, through a disturbance.
And I see you,
looking up through a disturbance,
a cutthroat.

The water is clear as a window with sheets
of rainwater running over it,
And I stand here as one who waits
for someone I need to appear.

Some say the orange gash below your gills
is a repository of a sixth sense.
If you could thirst, this is how you thirst.
Your patience amazes, as you wait
for the stonefly nymph to rise, molt, lift,
and then you fly as if to teach the stonefly
flight. Again, you wait below a boulder
watching the river pass as I wait
below a mountain watching the stream pass.
Your green algae drifts in the current.
My willows stream above the stream
with the wind of a coming storm.
God is watching.

How Could I be a fisher of men
had I never stood in moving water
with all invisible line between my hands
and a multitude of choosing and mending,
if I had not turned over the most unremarkable
of rocks and apprenticed to an insect,
if I had not witnessed the orange prisms of dew
dropping from the tips of spearmint leaves
touched by the small breeze cleansing this place?

Copyright © 2009 John Poch All rights reserved
from Dolls
Orchises Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission