Wallowing in this bloody sty, <br />I cast for fish that pleased my eye <br />(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends <br />No pots of gold to weight its ends); <br />Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout <br />Rose to my bait. They flopped about <br />My canvas creel until the moth <br />Corrupted its unstable cloth. <br /> <br />A calendar to tell the day; <br />A handkerchief to wave away <br />The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm <br />Pouching a bottle in one arm; <br />A whiskey bottle full of worms; <br />And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms <br />To mete the worm whose molten rage <br />Boils in the belly of old age? <br /> <br />Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- <br />O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, <br />Let suns stay in or suns step out: <br />Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- <br />The fisher's fluent and obscene <br />Catches kept his conscience clean. <br />Children, the raging memory drools <br />Over the glory of past pools. <br /> <br />Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls <br />Its bloody waters into holes; <br />A grain of sand inside my shoe <br />Mimics the moon that might undo <br />Man and Creation too; remorse, <br />Stinking, has puddled up its source; <br />Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. <br />This is the pot-hole of old age. <br /> <br />Is there no way to cast my hook <br />Out of this dynamited brook? <br />The Fisher's sons must cast about <br />When shallow waters peter out. <br />I will catch Christ with a greased worm, <br />And when the Prince of Darkness stalks <br />My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . <br />On water the Man-Fisher walks.<br /><br />Robert Lowell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-drunken-fisherman/
