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The Pond at
Plum Thicket
Farm
When
we were kids
we’d sit at
night
beside
the pond among
the willows,
lantern
hissing as fishing
lines ran
past
shallow weeds
to deep dark
where
baited hooks
waited for smooth
black
catfish
and mounded
snapping turtles
the
size of steering
wheels.
Decades
later my father
and
his melanoma
lay at night
in
the house beside
the pond,
his
back turned
to mother as
he
stared at a
bright dial
and
listened
to romance through
a
thin wire.
When
my mind wanders
the
stony field
of my father’s
death
it
doesn’t go to
the final place
but
into those nights
where mother
and father lay,
she
in her gray
dream or feigning
sleep
while
she watched
his death approaching,
he
listening through
an earphone
to voices from
far cities
in
that small dark
room beside
the pond.
To
this day I sometimes
dream of a gray
night
and
a flat black
lake filled
with huge slick
fish,
and
I and my father
cast to them
and
laugh with the
joy of catching.
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