Second Place Winner, July 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, July 2003

FISHING WITH THE WARDOG
Pedro Trevino-Ramirez
(Salty Dreams)

My father was not a highwayman, executioner:
a line cast into the Potomac, boy, do you like catfish?
Like a stone or
earthenware body
marble eye-pits,
the man did not tilt. I thought he had died

or fallen to sleep, upright, totem—he was a painted man,
conceived in browns, olive drab; adorned to the pier
while I snubbed the wind.
I had seen this
on many nights:
the aztecman in hunt—
I had been prey, ready to make sunspots, sunblood,
though the whiskers and river eel proved better
than I.

My father was not the moon, pulling water from coves:
Texas passage to Appalachia, he was a line of silk or
taut leather—
boy, this is where life goes, on a hook, on a hook.
I am a man with a curved steel spine,
years later, in the river, in the river.

Judge Claire Hero’s comment: “This poem asks the reader to participate in the moment. It does not provide any easy answers, does not moralize on questions of life, death, family, or war. Instead, it presents the father to us in all his mystery, what he is not as much as what he is, and when I reach the final couplet, I find it moving.”