Light and What it Does to Us

For most of my life I've been wrong
about water: twice-a-day dipping my head under a river or, after
I'd given up on rivers, a shower-head, until all I could hear was pressure
smacking bone. And the spray of what's left. And sunlight
hardening on the current. Let's forget
about water for a moment. There's a difference
between what we smash and what smashes us. Years ago,
barreling across Montana, I gave up one town, then another, then another and
for a moment thought I'd stolen back the splendid isolation
of salmon nosing upstream. It's ridiculous. For sixty years
a man walks to the same stretch of dirt
and fishes for hours. I think of him there, sometimes,
digging the hook out of his third fish of the day, starting up his truck
as the last bands of light break over the far cut bank.
 
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by Jackson Holbert

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Jackson Holbert's work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush, BOAAT, Radar Poetry, and Parcel, among others. He is currently an undergraduate at Brandeis University.