Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poet Free verse

An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair

An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair

That same shed waits
by the trees.
Waits on its skids
for the lake to freeze,
and the for the creaking 
joints of bickering 
stoop-shouldered men
as they push it out to the center
of a pool of glass.
It houses the stories of fishing
in winter, pulling sustenance, 
wriggling, through chiseled 
portals into another realm.
Old men would wait 
like death, slow,
their breath 
turning to steam
until they could abduct 
their prey from the world below.
Trout would flop 
with the thickness of a muscled fist,
striking ice like distillery rage unhinged. 
They would twist and corkscrew,
mottled black and silver slapping 
the frozen pane of the lake,
waiting for suffocation to take them, 
as the old men drifted up in 
the steam of twice-warmed coffee,
and the willow-the-wisp exhalations
of ribald stories, retold, and finally forgotten.

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