We walked out to the middle of the pond
It was 54 degrees, and the mecury rising,
but he had been there like a Christmas ornament
in March, an errant icon, keeping Americana
current. It was the old country left in him,
he said, how his ancestors had done it,
from Quinnipiac, then Stockholm before that.

He had spinners and lures, and the gaping wonder
of a hole, the waters dark as the eye of a fish,
I kept eying the shore, wondering if it would
disappear within minutes, hours, the wind felt
Atlantic on my skin, low eastern seaboard,
except you can't smell brine this far north,
not even in the first week of March.

I told him he had to be losing his mind,
he said years ago, he couldn't pinpoint the date,
and someday, you'll find yourself in the middle
of a lake, running from bears, tracking lightning bolts,
it's in your nature, and knock-kneed though you may be,
you've proven something to the universe, when
you're out hear with me, in March, the temperature
rising, with nothing but variable inches of ice
between you and your perishing. How else do
you expect to teach other men to fish? And
though I swore I heard the ice crack several
times before I reached land, I had to smile
at the old man, crazy and foolish as he was.