Trout Fable
When the boy sees the trout
drift out of the waving grass
Into the wide-open sheen of water
A few feet away in the shallows,
Then a church is made out of the sun,
And a chorus grows between the glittering scales of the fish,
And the rib-cage of the boy fills with the voice of water
Until the lake burns with hysterical fire
And the boy and the fish are one.
Later, when the boy is no longer a boy,
And the fish is part of something else--
The brim of a leaf making the sun new again,
A fish-eye evolving into stone--
The boy will believe that his time on earth
Was spent dreaming in the rainbow of the fish
Where the water between them was the only sound
As his blood flowed into the trout's blood
To make all deaths equal.