Fishers

Vain to fish 
with unbaited hook, 
the proverb says. I fished that way,

at 9, after Sunday School at Trinity Presbyterian, as God said 
(my schizophrenic, periodically 
catatonic uncle and preacher said) 
thou shalt not kill, so I would kill 
neither lake bass nor earthworm, thought the Lord 
was watching that rowboat and testing 
me, like Job or Abraham, to see if I’d break 
some covenant we’d made 
I couldn’t remember making,

dreaded that like Joan of Arc I’d be summoned 
someday in my backyard, under the pecan tree’s 
velvet greenfuzzed litter, to leave 
Alexander III 3rd grade to go 
and raise an Army 
to end the napalm flamethrow jungleburn 
Walter Cronkite told me about

so for hours in the rowboat with my father 
who’d left his own war without ever going to combat 
to Travel Mental Troop to psychiatric 
discharge after six months and told his family 
he’d been the sole survivor 
of a kamikaze-bombed carrier,

my unbaited hook would twitch along the lake bottom’s 
algae slime, my earthworm snuck back into bucket-writhe. 
He couldn’t know I was deceiving him for the Lord, 
humiliated on my behalf 
that hour after hour I got 
not even a line-tug. It 
humiliated me to disappoint that Pacific hero. 
And this is how we did it, outings 
of Father and Son; fishing 
for each other, with unbaited hooks.