This late there’s little to see but the fading trail, its sharp drop in to the river canyon no more than a feeling, going down a thousand feet of switchbacks, sure of nothing but water forever carving the chasm floor. There’s a sense of peace felt nowhere else but in this dark descent, mind dead to the invisible world, breath hollow, automatic as a pulse, boot after boot plodding down the pillowed dust. Below, in that other time and place, the trout I’ve come for cruise deep pools under mountain shards, fanning the isinglass bottom of night. In the morning when they rise, a school of scattered prayers flaming from the rocks, I will kneel in the gravel with my first fish from the river, as unselfconsciously alive as the piscine dreams of God. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2005 by Neil Harrison

NAMING THE LAKES by Neil Harrison

Sometimes at night a younger world awakes, sounds and scents and scenes I’d long forgotten, and I can hear Olga naming the lakes, Hackberry, Dewey, the Alkali Lakes, Watts, Duck, Rice, Dad’s, Schoolhouse and Pelican. Sometimes at night a summer world awakes with Ernest telling me to watch for snakes mornings on the Rosebud reservation, and I can hear Olga naming the lakes we plan to fish — He-dog, Beeds — as she makes coffee, French toast, scrambled eggs and bacon. Sometimes at night a somber world awakes, vast concrete dams flood the Missouri breaks for miles above Pierre, Ft. Randall, Yankton, and I can hear Olga naming the lakes, Gavin’s, Oahe, and those long, blue aches ring true in the gray light of that false dawn those times at night when the grave world awakes and I can hear Olga naming the lakes. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2005 by Neil Harrison

REDEAR SUNFISH by Neil Harrison

Your friend spends a week up in Canada, comes back with epic tales of trophy fish, but midway through a monster northern saga he loses you to this image from the past: her tackle a cane pole, her bait a red worm, an old woman lifts a sliver of brilliance off the mud bottom of an old stock dam, out of tepid shallows, through a rug of moss; her thin line shimmering, a strand of light, she lands her catch beside a 4-year-old who laughs, drops to his knees in the dirt and reaches for that slick, cold shock of gold, a thing so alive an electric shiver shakes him at the core and leaves this scar. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2005 by Neil Harrison

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