“Be very quiet,” advised the Duke, “for it goes without saying.”
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Old poet wakes to the fable of himself.
More snow has fallen and the trees are white.

Enter a fox. Now he will watch all day
to see what else.

In a far different county on the margin
or as it were the shore of a silver field of rye
with a borrowed fly rod, casting as he
had been taught again and again
a flicker of red yarn at the end of the line

dancing farther out each shivering as it shivered
and curled and sang over the shimmering lake
as if to conjure by this titillation
his dream of a leaping trout—

angling with nothing, by the slingshot
of this new, loco motion,
to catch nothing more than this ancient technique.

It was yesterday, in the white room of the ortho clinic
the computer screen with the ghostly
sculpture of his lucent pelvic bones–
arches and empty places where the pathologist
says cartilage would be doing its work.

A dreamscape, a cage showing signs of thinning
age, but no telltale cracks to worry about.
Not ice. Not broken at the fundament.

Could still swerve and pulse to the beat.
Like fishing, to love without intention
except for the blessedness.