I was recently contacted by Jim Crissman to see if I’d like to post one of his poems on Casting Around.  Well, after reading it, I thought heck yeah.  I’m all about spreading the word on good fly fishing writing – which this poem is.  Jailbait in Holy Water is the title poem to Jim’s 1998 Pudding House Publications chapbook and it appeared originally in Gray’s Sporting Journal in 1997.

Jailbait in Holy Water

Drifting up through silver currents,
matching a pattern imprinted on a tiny brain,
the trout is a lower fish
of higher beauty
and taste.
A tight sequined gown,
rubies, jade, turquoise, and wet,
she falls for fur and feathers,
and flees an unseen vector,
a sharp focus of trout pain.
Throbbing runs, ever shorter, circling,
failing like cold fusion.
Surrendering to a perfect teardrop of polished cherry
as elegant in its way as a rainbow lifted,
dripping diamonds into quicksilver;
a sleek tapered calf in black fishnet, stretched.
Sparkling morning light flashing
even in the terror of her golden eye.
In air she gasps and I drink her moment,
ephemeral as mayflies and gossamer,
she slides home,
flashing to her gin chilly lair,
leaving me nothing;
getting away clean.

Bio: James W. Crissman is a veterinary pathologist and former large animal veterinarian. He is the author of a 1998 Pudding House Publications chapbook, Jailbait in Holy Water, and has won numerous prizes for his poetry. His short story, Wallhangers, won the 2007 Dirt Rag literature contest. Root Cause: the story of a food fight fugitive is his first novel. Jim and his veterinarian wife Jill live on a small farm in central Michigan where they’ve grown three children and much of their food for more than twenty years.

Jim’s new novel, Root Cause: The Story Of A Food Fight Fugitive, is now available over at Xlibris.   He tells me that it doesn’t contain any fly fishing, and I haven’t read it – so I can’t vouch for it, but the blurb on Xlibris sounds pretty interesting.

I just thought it would be nice to present some fly fishing poetry from a real poet here on Casting Around, so I asked Cameron Scott if I could “reprint” one of his poems. He was kind enough to say yes. Cameron is a fly fisher, guide and poet based out of the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado (lucky guy!). Find out more about him and check out more of Cam’s poems at his website.

Lamentations for the Complete Angler
by Cameron Scott

Cast your fly always up river,
and lift your rod at the first hint of a strike,
that you may more easily catch fish.
Do not let your fly sink. I say unto you,
learn to mend so that your fly remains buoyant.

Hold thyself still like a heron on small creeks; hold still, I say.
Give unto each mayfly and each caddis equal attention.
How remarkable they appear, both from above and below;
learn the ways of invention and imitation,
calling attention to these bodies of hackle and dubbing.
Weigh the kitchen table evenly with food and fly-tying equipment,
so that you may eat dinner and tie flies at the same time.

If you cannot catch fish, break not your fly rod across your leg in fury.
Neither drink of the river water, nor eat of the cress which grows
in the water, nor put lead flies in your mouth, nor eat mud.
Leave the wild turkeys alone, for what has the turkey done,
that you should go chasing them across a field of wheat
swishing your fly rod back and forth.

In the breast pocket of your garment, keep your license
and other important documents, so that they will remain
decipherable, that you shall not be fined or thrown in jail.
And hum not the humming in your nose as your friend
tries casting beneath the overhanging branches
of a cottonwood, nor stand nearby, skipping rocks
between one bank and another.
Neither forget what I said about the turkeys.

For if you heed these words, you shall find yourself
in the kingdom of the drag free drift. You shall wander
between sage plains and high mountain peaks
and watch rings of infinity spread in high country lakes.
You shall travel to countries and sleep beside foreign bodies.
You shall be lonely but never alone; you shall read
the writing on the rocks that others have writ before you,
and you shall be content, inseparable from you rod, your water, and your fish.

Used by permission of the Author and first published in Perigee, www.perigee-art.com, Issue 18: November, December, January 2007/2008 Poetry. All rights reserved.

Well- all things must come to an end, and so I find myself sitting at the computer for the last installment of my Daily Fly Fishing Poem project.   It comes a day late due to some technical difficulties (power outtage a while back), but I hope you can forgive me.   I think I’ve learned some things a long the way, and I hope I sparked a few imaginations, maybe? Thanks for indulging me. I apologize ahead of time for this last one.

Daily Fly Fishing Poem #30:The Fish

Like I have before a thousand times,
I cast, far off and fine, a fly.
And so a fish, spotted and speckled
with a galaxy of memories, and diamond dust,
turquoise and rubies and rust,
rose from the blackness into the light,
and drifted and , and…
and when I brought him in
he motioned with a fin, as if
to say come closer.
I leaned in, and he whispered,
“You can keep me, fry me when you take me home,
but please don’t make me into a poem.”