A RESPONSE

it was never about taking from Mother Nature
in our fishing trips engulfed by July heat
(at least not in the sense of taking which you thought):

sure, we took and ate, but i would like to think
that my father and i discovered some island in the middle
of that lake - somewhere where we could live alone
away from smog and concrete, a place where we
could carve things from wood and live on our own
with the little birds and fish that came about -
only taking what we needed

and we took more than that:
together we took each other in that old aluminum boat
and he took me to God and to Man
in the middle of uncrisp muddy water -
he took my hand and placed it on maple oars
and took my muscles (then undertoned . . .
still undertoned) and made them row, made them
grow, made them a manifestation of his manliness and mine

i took my father in that lake and turned him 'round
to someone who thought that maybe his son could be a son
(perhaps a ballplayer instead of a poet)
and into someone who would someday shake my hand
after my sixteenth birthday -
although he never called me son
and somehow,
i'm okay with that

so it was never about taking from Nature,
taking from the lake and reaping it -
in fact we always stayed within our legal limit -

it was always about those days in the sunset
and that wind that we used to cool ourselves off -
it was about my first Swiss Army Knife
and his old pocket knife -
it was about our matching soda bottles
and our tub of worms (he always told me that they never felt a thing)

truth be told, i hate fishing
but he loves it, so what choice did i have?