All Day, Pen Poised
This is how you get the poem.
You sit in the boat just offshore.
You cast--a whine as the sinker plunges.
Water slaps the boat's sides gently.
Voices drift from a cottage,
plunkety plunk on a summer piano,
toward evening a loon's cry,
and the silent beaver swimming their way
to some secret place.
Which is the poem--the thick-mouthed bass
you fling into the boat or the sounds
that foretold his arrival?
—Nellie Hill