NaPoWriMo Day 16: "Ten Things to Do While Fishing with Your Parents as a Child"

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt:  "Today’s prompt takes its inspirations from Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno.” Fundamentally, this is a poem about a cat. It’s also a structurally very straightforward poem – every line begins the same way, and is about some aspect of the cat at issue. But from these seemingly simple ingredients, Smart constructs a poem that is luminously, joyously weird. . . . Today, I challenge you to write a poem that uses the form of a list to defamiliarize the mundane."

Today's PAD Challenge prompt:  "Time for our third Two for Tuesday of the month! Pick one prompt or use both…your choice! [1] Write a catch poem. Catch a cold, a ball, a fish, or someone’s eye. [2] Write a release poem. Release your anger, a ball, a fish, or someone’s head (from a head lock while wrestling, of course)."

I feel like this combo could generate a ton of good ideas, but the second prompt immediately reminded me of the phrase "catch and release," which made me think about the many hours I spent in a fishing boat with my parents, occupying myself in various exquisite states of boredom. But so resonant now, as I imminently face selling our house on a lake where many of these memories take place. As the memories came back to me, I was sharply aware I was experiencing my own catch and release process too. I decided it would be ten things at the outset, to serve as a formal container.

  Ten Things to Do While Fishing with Your Parents as a Child

1. Cast the shore with them for a while. The crisp snap of rod and line, the thrill of the lure hitting the spot you aimed for.

2. Say “hey!” when one of their errant lines sprays you with wet. Duck to avoid the hook-prickled rapala.

3. Watch the edge of the woods for mysterious animals that might or might not appear. Watch the sky in the evening, wondering if those are birds or bats.

4. Trail your hand in the water as the electric motor ferries you slowly to the next spot.

5. Trail a homemade, blocky wooden toy boat on a string in the small wake, and ask your mother to make up a new Willy the Whaler story.

6. Create grotesque “salads” for display with weeds, dead minnow bits, and anything else you can find.

7. Lie across the uncomfortable middle seat, head propped on a flotation cushion, and read thick classic novels that are probably too old for you.

8. Sit up for the excitement when one of your parents catches something and reels it in. Feel sorry for the fish. Feel proud that they practice catch-and-release. Still feel sorry for the fish.

9. Try not to worry that whichever parent has caught fewer fish that day feels sad. Parental sadness is unspeakable, a scarcely perceptible mist over the water.

10. Smell that smell on your life preserver, the cushions, your father's jacket and everything -- fishiness, dried weed and algae, a trace of oil, sweat, the clear and bitter lake. Years later it will come back to you, to breathe it and let it go.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not city, copy, or quote without permission.