Gravity And Light is the title of a new series of work from Cameron Scott(longtime TFFJ friend and contributor), written during the summer of 2015 in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.

Cameron will be reading selected work at Georgetown Brewing in Seattle next Thursday(11/19), along with a plethora of other talented authors, in support of Wild Steelhead Coalition. A few tickets are still available, but they won’t last long. For more info check out Writers on the Fly.

Gravity and Light 81, Emerger

Come up for air, Cameron Scott. For a few minutes

from the currents

long enough to remember what it feels like dry

before going under again. You

live under the rocks which were writ by bugs.

One minute you feel the need to kick up toward the light

and the next you’re in the stomach of a trout.

Someone you once loved

told you it is where you will learn to be broken.

Over and over, in winter, with ice.

In each grain of pollen lodging in your eyes. Your soul

keeps pushing up for air, but you

keep pushing it back down. Not yet. You are

not ready for life away from moving water. The way

it sings. The way pushing against it day after day

makes you walk like an old man.

You are something betrayed, the part that wants

only to fish for as long as you can. The part

that wants nothing to do with fishing.

Your fish have eaten everything that’s come close

to upsetting you. You understandably

adore them. They are big

and fearsome and don’t take shit. Which means

if you let your fingers talk

its fish that are bound to show up on the end of your line.

Gravity and Light 37, Harvey Gap

This is a poem about the self who sleeps poorly

but has no unfathomable troubles. Does not get wasted

but spends entire days in the waste, stalking fish. Asks

What is the difference anymore between a fishbowl

and a lake? More and more there is a one-ness

to everything. Cutting up the pike to bait the nets to

gather crawfish to feed a group of fishing guides. What

once felt wild has become commonplace. The differences

between outside and inside are blurred. There is

a lengthening of the fillet knife, a quickening of the catch.

A rising of the moon and headlamps along the lake’s edge

like stars. And the boredom of cold fried chicken and warm

beer. I have done all this before. In this lifetime, and also

in the next. Held behind the shelled head as pinchers

sought flesh. Cigarette smoke heavy on the air. Watched

as young men and old men passed the nets between

one another like stories. Lost themselves to the night.

Gravity and Light 54, Butternut Browns

for Kea Hause

Even with you gone the whole river today was your body

breaking into song. Behind each rock,

among the rainbows and broken branches,

the low shapes I love best fed behind

pockets and in seams, burst onto the surface like shots

of wheat field light. The warmest

parts of the river, closest to fire, cullers of

sculpin and golden stones. Each glimpse brings this

unreasonable desire to believe you live on.

The edge below the mossy rocks and over-

hanging spruce boughs. Beneath undercut banks.

When the river begins to drop, your body shines like the sun.