Comments
Loading Dream Comments...
You must be logged in to write a comment - Log In
In a underground comics style OLD MAN TROUT In Trout Fishing in Amerikkka, the river has a passport and a throat. At the old home creek, the trout are demented in a very organized way. They line up under the bank like clerks waiting for a stamp, each one holding a tiny folder labeled HOPES, WORMS, DISAPPOINTMENTS. One trout clears his gills and asks if today is a holiday. A bass voice arrives from somebody’s radio—Paul Robeson singing that famous river song where the water keeps moving and the people keep carrying. The voice is so large it makes the stones stand straighter. Even the moss looks guilty. I try to fish like Richard Brautigan would: politely, as if the hook is a question asked in a library. The creek answers with a cough. Kharms walks in from behind a fir tree, wearing a hat made of punctuation. He says, “The river is old.” Then he trips over a metaphor and falls directly into silence. The splash is perfectly bureaucratic. Erofeev is already on the bank, conducting the current with an empty bottle, explaining that every river is a train schedule, and every train schedule is a confession. He promises to show me the station where sadness changes lines, but we miss it because the moon is checking tickets. Dovlatov lights a cigarette he doesn’t have and says, with that tired tenderness: “In our country, the river would write a complaint. In yours, it writes a song and everyone pretends it’s history.” The trout listen to Robeson the way guilty men listen to a judge: heads down, hearts up. One rises, takes my fly gently, and returns it, as if to say: This isn’t the right bait for this kind of truth. The creek keeps going. The voice keeps going. Amerikkka keeps misplacing its own soul in the tackle box. I go home with an empty creel and a full river in my chest, humming without words, because the words belong to the water.
In Trout Fishing in Amerikkka, the river has a passport and a throat.
At the old home creek, the trout are demented in a very organized way. They line up under the bank like clerks waiting for a stamp, each one holding a tiny folder labeled HOPES, WORMS, DISAPPOINTMENTS. One trout clears his gills and asks if today is a holiday.
A bass voice arrives from somebody’s radio—Paul Robeson singing that famous river song where the water keeps moving and the people keep carrying. The voice is so large it makes the stones stand straighter. Even the moss looks guilty.
I try to fish like Richard Brautigan would: politely, as if the hook is a question asked in a library. The creek answers with a cough.
Kharms walks in from behind a fir tree, wearing a hat made of punctuation. He says, “The river is old.” Then he trips over a metaphor and falls directly into silence. The splash is perfectly bureaucratic.
Erofeev is already on the bank, conducting the current with an empty bottle, explaining that every river is a train schedule, and every train schedule is a confession. He promises to show me the station where sadness changes lines, but we miss it because the moon is checking tickets.
Dovlatov lights a cigarette he doesn’t have and says, with that tired tenderness: “In our country, the river would write a complaint. In yours, it writes a song and everyone pretends it’s history.”
The trout listen to Robeson the way guilty men listen to a judge: heads down, hearts up. One rises, takes my fly gently, and returns it, as if to say: This isn’t the right bait for this kind of truth.
The creek keeps going. The voice keeps going. Amerikkka keeps misplacing its own soul in the tackle box.
I go home with an empty creel and a full river in my chest, humming without words, because the words belong to the water.
