Lures

Last summer’s fishing failures dangled from trees:

a Rapala and Jitterbug a stand

of privet paid for, half-ounce jigs with rubber skirts

and jelly worms with wide-gap hooks on ten-pound test

we tithed with overzealous casts at bass.

Then off we’d go (our stringers bare) to find

a yard to cut, a truck to wash, so we could fill

the tackle box we shared again. Today

is 12/12/12, the Mayan end, and I,

a country boy in Brooklyn for the week,

will hail a cab for the first time and think

of cows unnerved by fish we missed

and shouts of “shit” that followed, and dawns to dusks

and always back with you, my childhood friend.

Our girls will never know that pond’s deep hole

a baseball diamond now fills — the city leaders’ bright

idea — or how their fathers sitting in the bleachers

on Saturdays a couple decades later

can almost feel the stinging nettle against

their thighs, the lunker largemouth sweeping the bed

with her tail while plastic lizards jerk and drag

across the third base line, or how when we

untrain our ears to baseballs cracking bats

and bitchy parents, called strikes and alike,

we hear the peepers sounding off in oaks

on down the way, our mothers’ and fathers’ voices

calling us home not too far behind or ahead.