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Brent
McCafferty
Holter Lake, Fishing with My Brother
Holter Lake green, moon low and freckled
with meteor holes. Not an animal to be heard calling
in the darkness for a child. Our fishing tackle
languishing in the back of the car after the
debacle
of a day-long drive that should've taken one
hour (flats stalling
us in Cascade and near Craig). Improvising,
we hackle
an old nightshirt into thin strips with which we
cobble
together cloths resembling bandanas and commence
dolling
up our heads like Bolshevik widows to avoid the macled
double-mouths of hungry mosquitoes. From
local grackles,
wolves, and wolverines one learns patience;
after pooling
birchwood sticks from the cab of our fishing
vehicle
in the middle of a sandy firepit, I arrange them in an
up-rising circle --
well, a circular base with a teepee's pointed top --
and, pulling
a match over my well-worn matchbox over, over, over,
produce a small speckle
of flame. On the beach, in the dumb night,
the soft, almost indelible crackle
of coiling, fish-tongued fire. Brandon, with
little stalling
to adjust his too-big fishing shorts, gives
a get-up-get-moving-and-go cackle
as he cannonballs into our best bass hole --
ruinin' it, to use the Montana vernacle.
Snowshoe Rabbit
Our arctic eminence
trails tiny, clover-soft tracks
behind broad, gabardine backs
of his flensed
paws, which, stripped of any semblance
of fat, look lean but do not lack
for muscle, sturdy, like a thick
deck of cards whose tense
spines snap from a standard
pack per their druthers,
blacks and reds fluttering among the neat
fingers of the word-
less dealer who throws a silent six, then another --
paired, as the hare's hind feet
Brandon Kills a Cereal Leaf Beetle
Outside a Teton Park Outhouse
It seems his mini-flashlight's caught the wight
in unpropitious pause upon the bright-
hued door whose silver placard reads in ten
(less one) clean-stenciled letters GENTLEMEN;
on his way in he gives the bug a smack
in unabashed indifference with the back
of his free hand, which he soon washes clean
at spigot's head beside the steel latrine
©2006 by Brent McCafferty
Raised in the wine country of southern France, Brent
McCafferty recently moved from Bordeaux to the United
States' eastern shores. As a sometime sommelier for
the Chateaux St. Michelle, Haut-Brion, and d'Yquem,
the author has developed a fondness for Michelle
Eroica
Riesling, vintage 2003. He lives and writes in College
Park, Maryland.
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