Just 10 and alone,
often I’d walk to our farm pond,
seining the wind as I went.

Dragonflies and blackbirds saw me as theirs.
Bullfrogs kept apart, grumbling in the moss,
while assorted fish milled round like
unfledged thoughts beneath the pier I swayed on.

Through the water I swiped my net.
Away fled the fish, though often I snared
some twitchy fingerling held for a time
to weigh its worth in my hand.

What had I but time?
Slowly the fish returned to their purposes,
busying after meanings known only to them.
I sought a lunker’s heft and measure,
but a small fry netting small fry I remained.

How does 70 differ? Thoughts like fish still
school in my mind, the smaller easily claimed,
the lunkers slippery as eels, and I’d say

I’m still alone, swiping at minnows,
though sometimes, sizing up life’s
grandest ideas, I myself feel lifted—
supported—by others’ hands, as if they judge
the worth of this man caught in their net.
                        

He'd have thought at once: raccoon!
The snow had gone,
the boars had done their work,
the sows, heavy with young,
needed somewhere to nest.

Surely the beast climbed the apple tree,
took the leap—a hefty THUMP
would've torn him from his late-night
book. The devils, always on the lookout
for some ingress to the attic. And had I not

said, “Prune the limbs”? I can see
it all: fearing those rooftop scrabblings
would add fuel to my fire of vexation
were I to awaken—the moon
eerily silvering the trees and the grass—

out he snuck, fetching ladder and a club
to show some heinous squatter a thing
or two, then mounted stealthily each rung
to prevent their groaning beneath his heft.
A boy-man on a sanguinary mission,

did he see himself a warrior
cresting a battlement, weapon ready,
a sudden shiver of dread delighting him,
a smidgen of danger like a sauce
he'd long since gone without?

What else could possess a man wearing
super bowl slippers to ascend in darkness
a lofty wall and clamber atop a pitched roof
bent on scaring to hell an intruder
hissing and snarling from its vantaged perch?

This much is clear: neither eyes nor teeth
need have shone in moonlight down at him
nor provoked his final curse and cry.
I’d much rather heard him softly sigh, “Dear,
I pruned that tree. Shall we play now?”