☀ Today's Poem: "A Wager" Jeff Ewing

Below an outcrop of black lava that bent the tracks
and made the train wheels shriek, between the loose scree
of the embankment and the soft, sponging
grass of the riverbank,
I made a wager with myself: If I caught one that morning—
brown, rainbow, cutthroat, it didn't matter which—
if I could land just one fish, the baby
would be healthy.

It was a little game I played with myself, nothing more.
If this then that, if that then this—an illusion of control
where there was no control, only chance,
a turning over of cards.
The cliffs on the far side leaned close, breathing haze onto
the water, the deep lies along the cutbank were still in shade.
I stepped in, cast up toward an eddy folding
the current along hidden rifts,

and waited...knowing the strike would come, but caught
all the same when the pale belly flashed and the leader,
then the line, went taut and dove
toward the memory of deeper water.
I set the hook lightly (out of caution, too lightly)
as the trout turned downstream, counting on the current to draw it away
from the monofilament tangent,
the beaded treachery of air.

Every muscle straining against the pull, its will
compressed into one thought, it thrashed its head and threw
the hook...When the line went slack
I didn't reel in right away; I stood
where I was and let the current, bitter cold with last
year's snow, push against my legs. I looked into the riffles
where the light disappeared among polished stones,
and waited for the end—

for fate in the guise of a bent-nose mobster to wade
upstream from Reno and collect; to force me to go on, to live
without my finger tightly clenched, just once, by a hand
too delicate for line mending.
I thought I had lost everything, I thought I would be held
to my wager—then I began to argue: If the world of the wager
were true, if that was my daughter silvering away downstream,
then the twist of head that freed the hook

was her choice, no one else’s. And I thought—
I'd better get used to that. Because one day, a day like this, a day
full-up with sun and loss, with clear water and hubris,
she'll turn her head, smile and go—
and won’t have the time, even if she wanted, to watch
the brush go pale with heat, to feel the weightless line draw "S"es
on the surface film, to know the house has forgiven all debts,
to join me on the long walk home.