NaPoWriMo #2: snapshot

I didn't choose to use Read Write Poem's prompt today, although I may go back to it, as it's a good one. I've been thinking a lot about trying to be more descriptive, so my poem today is really an exercise in that: coming up with some specific details about a place I used to go when I was a kid, a cabin my mom's parents had up in British Columbia. My jumping off point was a photo taken of me the summer I was eight, after spending the morning fishing with my grandfather. It was the last summer I ever spent there, as he died the following year and my grandmother sold the cabin.


Lac De Roche

It’s a two day trip from Seattle
in their pale blue station wagon
with the faux wood panels on each side
we stop for gas and I wheedle my grandparents
to buy me Archie comics off rotating wire racks
those ones with ads in the back
where you can send away for sea monkeys
or X-ray glasses or decoder rings
or sparkling rainbow iron-on decals
we spend the night at a Sandman Inn
somewhere over the border
and finally
I see waist-high grass shifting beneath warm breezes
bisected by split rails sloping down to the shore
of Lac De Roche
and near lake’s edge a boat house, a cabin
unfinished timber built on bare concrete
and no hot water.

***

I’m hunting through the grass
for low bushes growing along fence rails
picking wild green gooseberries for nana
their taut globes whiskery and translucent
with pale veins shining through
warm from hanging all day in the sun
I have to weave deftly through thorns
to find enough to fill my plastic bucket
and when it’s full
when I have enough for a whole pie
I carry my bucket back to her
the tangy scent of them stinging my nose
making my eyes water
all the way back to the cabin
sour must be an acquired taste
for I don’t love it yet
don’t see the value of braving thorns
only to be rewarded by bitter fruit
I suck my cheeks in hollow
after a single tart bite of pie
poke once at its sugary crust
and leave the rest on my plate.

***

I have only a few pictures of me there
the last one: eight year-old me
sitting on the cabin’s thin cement doorstep
wearing a shirt the color of dried blood
hiked up enough to show an inch of belly
as I hold my arms high and in front
each thumb pressed hard against my fists
gingerly gripping the slimy tails of
two silvery speckle-scaled rainbow trout
because neatly hooking my index finger
through their gill slits like grandpa showed me
would bring my fingertips too close
to those arcs of tiny teeth and so
I wince a smile at him behind his camera
please hurry up my victory photo shoot
just one pose is enough: those first two fish
and all the awkward pride of eight years
now I ask why, why no picture of him and me
of what really lasted from this clear morning
as we zip then cinch our stiff life-jackets
rock to the gentle sputter and hum of the motor
slicing through soft waves to the lake’s center
him wordlessly watching while I deliberately
select my lure: black with silver flecks
showing me how to cast, to wait, to be
and then we are suspended in time, in space
caught somewhere between heaven and water
on the still lake of rocks and all around
ringed in a corona of evergreen rising up and up.