Hague, Richard

Northern Kentucky University (NKU): DSpace

30Fishby Richard HagueMy first was a nightcat, mud-yellow, spined,hauled from the basement of the riverin Steubenville. It stabbed my palm,marked me with a warningpunctuation.Then a bass, fingerling, from a strip-mine pond,slender and bright as a case knife’s blade,its jutted lower jawripped by the hook.How it lingered a momentwhen I tossed it back,as if cursing me as it caught its breathand mine.And the one in the mind, forever uncaught, vivid and immortal before the altar of my myth:a lunker shovelhead, snaggedjust above some old wicket dam upriver,wild country on either shore,no houses for miles,me in a leaking boat near dawn, fog closing in—and the sweet singing of the reelas it runs my linequick in that dying night.

Fish

https://dspace.nku.edu/bitstream/11216/1354/1/Fish.pdf

Fish

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Northern Kentucky University (NKU): DSpace