Walleye
In the gray areas, at dawn or dusk,
or in the “chop” of lakes on windy days
walleye feed only where they’re advantaged
by the vision of their eye which in fact
protrudes as though beaming at a wall.
My friend’s father, a banker, would leave
his banker’s hours some weekends
to come home late Sunday afternoon
scruffy, haggard and smelly, a banker’s
opposite, with coolers full of crushed ice
and gutted walleye with the heads—
like pike toothed agape in token menace,
like perch with fanned double back fins.
Only like themselves agog in either
genuine remorse or resentment, god knew.
Our homes that took in the sportsman’s
generosity were at first aromatized hazily
by herbs and the crumbly flesh sautéed in butter—
that finally left a stubborn stink.
Slept, shaven, in his suit and tie again
he’d drive back off for his desk at the bank
with his windshield glinting under the sun
and blue sky that drove the walleye
away from the shoreline back to the deep end.
What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American. It’s the title of a poetry collection by the late great Richard Hugo – and it sprang instantly to mind when Somerville poet Michael T. Steffen offered his poem “Walleye” to the Red Letters, though I wasn’t quite sure why. Certainly there’s walleye and pike swimming throughout Hugo’s poetry, as he writes about fishing in Montana and the Pacific Northwest, but that’s merely the superficial. In Steffen’s poem, set in his childhood home of Norfolk, Nebraska, he elevates the quietly significant dramas of small-town life until they fill memory’s spot-lit stage (and certainly Hugo would smile upon that.) Especially for a young person, these glimpses of how grownups live, what they value, how their small gestures end up assuming an outsized significance – these are part of our essential education. The poem is filled with contrasts and transformations: the neighbor changing from the besuited businessman, governed by his banker’s hours, into the “scruffy” and perhaps more thoroughly-satisfied fisherman; those delectable smells of fish frying turning into the “stubborn stink” that’s left behind; and even the hazy weather that rewards the fisherman’s patience compared to the bright blue Monday morning that drives fish to hide in the shadows. Steffen’s restrained imagery and sometimes darting syntax require a similar patience if readers are to reel in what’s moving there beneath the surface – which, to my mind, includes the sort of elusive but well-loved experiences that feels quintessentially American.
Steffen’s poetry has appeared in venues such as Another Chicago Magazine, The Boston Globe, Harvard Review Online, Ibbetson Street, and Taos Journal. His first book, Partner, Orchard, Day Moon, was published in 2014. A new collection, On Earth As It Is, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press and from which today’s poem is taken. I, for one, am grateful to be the beneficiary of this poet’s bountiful catch.