A Brown Trout
I.
You descend into forethought.
Dried caddis shells
line the river banks and
with the rain tonight, the current
will pull them back—origin
upon origin—
the moonlight leading
our milky oblivion.
You are partial to regret.
II.
As tree, she gives in.
We circle the grove,
placing the just ripe apples
into our pockets, we stop to interrupt
the symphony of swallows,
cicadas and crickets
in the shallow pit band of the orchard.
To know instants—as
infant molecules
suspended between
limitations. It is to be
human. As tree she returns,
unending and unending.
III.
She calms the flooded valley,
empties an invisible tender
into the still-glass corpuscle
of reservoir.
Constant on summer’s
perennial cloud,
the swallows rise—
their laughter,
a communion.
IV.
Exhaled,
the olive green body wandered,
drunkenly, to a rock above them.
You are beautiful, I won’t pretend you aren’t.
The trout pulled its head
toward the embankment, loosened itself
into the current,
soon forgotten between the shades
of the nascent and the departed.
Friend.
You are dying?
I am a man of miracles.
You are beautiful, I won’t pretend you aren’t.
V.
Unravel the wheel.
VI.
She
and boys gasp, watching.
My dog’s face is covered in sand,
the beach is his room.
A paradigm of black,
wildly quiet.
His face a mole,
the acrid tenure of beauty
smeared across the nose and eyes,
spread wide, ear to limp ear.
Sighing, slovenly, in his bed,
the bodies rise and
rise again
VII.
I am composing a river,
a stream, with or without you.
The current rising in emerald
nosegays, slowly,
slowly, the fore-count
cadence—
handfuls of sand
smoothing her teeth,
brackish on her fingertips.
VIII.
The soft-wooded pines predict the history of the valley.
Heads raised, we consider a bow.
A hill rises above another,
and as many angels as we see
appear.
IX.
Recalcitrant tenor,
her half-light hanging
on the precipice before me.
This is a body of water, a body
affixing ground to sky, unaware.
An apocrypha,
reeling in the calm
dresses of a warm September afternoon,
suspended.
X.
Body turns into body,
the supine relief.
We are performative,
And bearing
And not yet finished.
Oak turns to beech,
to sweetgum to maple to ash—
XI.
Fingers try to interpret
the intelligence of her apiary.
She is not,
and we find that we are
drunk too early,
that we are ubiquitous and
not raven-like. Over born
and indignant to others,
speaking so that,
somehow, the stream
endowed with evening will not
give us away
before we can retreat to
either Bolivia or Montana.
| Chris Caldemeyer |
|
levelheaded: A Brown Trout
Chris Caldemeyer’s “A Brown Trout” often takes place in the mind, in “forethought,” or in recollection that leads to mixed feelings. Complimenting the airiness of the poem’s associative framework are its rich, interwoven descriptions of nature and human interaction. From nature we get the riverbanks, the rain, the moon, and the symphony of insects in the orchard. Concerning love we have a woman “As tree”—“she gives in […] she calms the flooded valley […] she returns, / unending and unending.”
One of the poem’s greatest strengths is the versatility with which its author describes beauty. Sometimes he is direct and declarative—“you are beautiful, I won’t pretend you aren’t.” Other times he provides hints, as in the description of the trout loosening itself into the current. Both methods of description come hand in hand, just as the poem’s many themes. For example, an obscure and perhaps conceptual “wheel” that we need to “unravel” exists in the poem alongside explicit bodily love (“in his bed / the bodies rise and / rise again)”.
We’ll leave the rest of the images for the reader to explore, but point out again the strength in their ambiguity: there is solitude and union, contemplation and physicality. Which will prevail—the self-sufficiency of the single person who is “a stream, with or without you,” or the “we who are ubiquitous”? And who is this brown trout that appeared in the title and “pulled its head” all of a sudden in the middle of the fourth stanza? Instead of a clear answer, the poem offers the depth of its imagery as a pool of inspiring prospects.
– The Editors
