Fishing for Bream

We sit on the spillway, the red and white bobbers lilted by the wind, while some force beneath the water brings everything to attention, the tight line, the echoed rings conjuring tension inside us. And when I touch the rod, a living strangeness, a quivering unseen tugs at my imagination, not receiving but sending some impulse down the line, into the muddy water, and when the sunfish erupts I've made the spangles of water the verdant scales, the shudder of tail fin and light. We build fish all afternoon, threading hooks, looping line into a tight noose, running gills down the stringer into an opalescent chain of glimmering emerald bodies. Soon our mothers will call with their icy vodka voices and we will carry them home like the weight of guilt, but for now night closes around us.