On Munsungun

My father in the aluminum stern, cursing another fouled blood-knot: all the shits and fucks as integral to the art of fishing as the bait-fish, little silver smelts I sewed like a manual transmission, the same inbred order and precision needling the leader through the ass, out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril and back down—suffering as my father suffered the bastard no-see-ums and the guttering Johnson the obligatory dud, orange egg-pearls ballooning from its bust underside, hundreds of duds like every shit-luck setback that drove us on, fed by the huge image of everything we'd never caught, moving in joint blindness under Munsungun. And whatever it was it was the fight that delivered us—a tension like a sequestered muscle, the line spooling, unspooling, the holy-shit- litany pulled from our awed mouths contracting with distance until a whole silence surfaced, the viscid, slapping body absorbing and reflecting raw light like the bit of cornea above a pupil. And then his tremendous, decent hands brandishing an oar-butt; the brilliant lace of the gills, their crumpled hinge flaring in bilge water; and the line, whipping and shuttling, feeding invisibly back, moving on on Munsungun, sons survived by the same damn hunt they heired.