Catfish Poem by Robert Dawson

Catfish

Where can I bury the gills
and guts of all the fish I caught
with my Father? "Rise and shine, "
he'd crow before sunrise,
grinning with his breakfast cereal sheen.
After coffee and Mother's Raisin Rings,
leaving cups and crumbs for Ma
when she got up, we toted
our tackle to the car. He barked
at me to wear my jacket
that was just like his but size small.
I wouldn't. I preferred
to shiver on the chilly jalopy seat
and listen to the polar whines
of the Nash radio. Sometimes
the sun and a clear station would
flood up together. Father
squawked along with Kate Smith
while I squeezed my bladder
against the inevitable
begging to stop. Once I was
too full for a filling station.
From the ditch, I watched his car
start to roll. Unzipped
I waddled after him half a block.

I was too tender to bait my hook
or cast left-handed. For all he'd bray
about my schoolwork in the bait shop,
in the car he'd wish he'd had a boy
instead of a girl. Not an unreasonable wish!
On his trips, I was always babyish,
boisterous or crushed.

Only on the lake was I grownup,
dipping my bobber in the ripples,
stabbing my pole
at a devil's darning needle.
Once I hauled a dogfish
through the living water film.
Hung like a dried bat on a dead snag,
it marked our favorite fish-hole for a year.

It was catfish we were after,
black, sulfur-throated mud cats
groping the mud flowers of the bottom,
angling for grubs with delicate mustachios,
tiny eyes but sensitive fins
and a sixth sense we knew nothing about,
their slimy skin aware of every vibration,
feeling the shape of their world as we see the color,
feeling perhaps our shapes under our clothes,
unfrightened by touch.

Only when one of these vivid fish
took pity on me and sacrificed itself
like God on my hook
did my father notice me,
snatching it from my sorry
fingers, bashing its head
on the oarlock, wrenching the barb
out of its gasping mouth, stripping
its skin with a pliers,
gouging with his thumb its diaphanous swim
bladder for me to dry and pop,
packing the carcass in ice
and flipping the head in the bilge
to gulp and gulp.