Delayed Harvest
for Jim McKean
Before we struggled to hold light
along this line of the Jacob Fork,
we tied on the nearly invisible
tippet to nymph pools, glimpse
broken halos. Rainbows held low
in their lanes. Sometimes they rose
to brighten the surface, our breath
tightening on the take. The rest
of the morning, we worked a section
below the bridge, wanting only
to return shadows into the river.
Copyright © 2019 by Jon Pineda. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 11, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“It’s no secret among my family and friends that I’m obsessed with fly fishing and have been for years. The poem ‘Delayed Harvest’ came about after a friend (the poet and memoirist James McKean) and I fished the Jacob Fork River, located in the mountains of North Carolina. Sections of a river marked ‘delayed harvest’ are for catch and release only, and so for a brief moment, if everything comes together in just the right way, you get to hold some of this light and, more importantly, let it go.”
—Jon Pineda
Jon Pineda
Jon Pineda’s most recent book is the novel Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). He directs the creative writing program at William & Mary and lives in Virginia.