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Gravity And Light
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.