Casting the net
Written March 2013
Salmon nearly kill themselves for it, this thing that drives
us – the male of our species – crazy from something we inherit from birth,
making us leap up falls we ought to fall down, humping up impossible leaps to
get back to that place where everything started. We are consumed with trying it
all again, drunk on perfume or the look in her eyes.
Not just me, all of us, as if just a glimpse of her image scends
us into a feeding frenzy, so utterly predictable, caught in the net of her gaze.
She doesn’t snare men. We snare ourselves, pained when she
casts this one or that one aside because this one or that one just won’t do, the
outcasts caught in some dead pool eddy, going round and round, and the most
foolish of us, lingering near where the clear water still flows, desperate for
a glimpse of her as she carries her net on to someone else, we who might have
had, but just weren’t good enough.
For the first time after all these months, I understand the
parade of such people, who gasp for air in the still water, grasping at slippery
rocks just to keep from being dragged back down falls we are too weak or
unworthy to leap up again.
Such men do not understand how she must feel, casting and
recasting her net, dragging in bodies she hopes will live up to what she expects
when none ever do, tossing them back when they don’t, and always asking as she
casts again, “Is this the one?”
For all the fish in the sea, all those who leap with silvery
wet skins shimmering for her attention, none prove worthy, none bringing with
them that thing she so desperately needs, a thing she can’t describe even in
the best of her poems, but will recognize when she sees it, none kind enough or
caring enough, some almost, but not quite, while others taken, she casting out
again and again dragging it all in, casting aside what won’t do, all these long
months, all those sad poems, all those terrible lonely nights clutching her wet
net and asking, “Is this the one,” and still never is.
It's no wonder all of her songs sound so sad, because they
are.
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