Adam Vines

I spit my smack, Jim slugs his Jack, Rob stews his lack, Carey prepares his rack, herons hunker on blowdowns, deer wait on high moon for their rounds, and the campfire might as well be an empire we all watch dissolve (in the slough, a carp roll, a splash) into ash.

For Scott Harris Last summer’s fishing failures dangled from trees: a Rapala and Jitterbug a stand of privet paid for, half-ounce jigs with rubber skirts and jelly worms with wide-gap hooks on ten-pound test we tithed with overzealous casts at bass. Then off we’d go (our stringers bare) to find a yard to cut, a truck to wash, so we could fill the tackle box we shared again. Today is 12/12/12, the Mayan end, and I, a country boy in Brooklyn for the week, will hail a cab for the first time and think of cows unnerved by fish we missed and shouts of “shit” that followed, and dawns to dusks and always back with you, my childhood friend. Our girls will never know that pond’s deep hole a baseball diamond now fills — the city leaders’ bright idea — or how their fathers sitting in the bleachers on Saturdays a couple decades later can almost feel the stinging nettle against their thighs, the lunker largemouth sweeping the bed with her tail while plastic lizards jerk and drag across the third base line, or how when we untrain our ears to baseballs cracking bats and bitchy parents, called strikes and alike, we hear the peepers sounding off in oaks on down the way, our mothers’ and fathers’ voices calling us home not too far behind or ahead.