Fishing at midnight – Richard Luftig

 

a blood-red moon

means me no good

 

and stars winking

their secrets

 

are not about to tell.

bass in this lake

 

have gone on strike

for better food

 

and my lures

are not fooling

 

anyone. but later

after my rowboat

 

has cut through

the last diagonal

 

of water, I’ll climb

the hill to my cabin

 

watch squirrels run

under a spotlight

 

floodlamp across

telephone wires

 

like acrobats

without a net

 

crawl under a blanket

try to sleep leaving

 

any upcoming dawns

to fend for themselves.

 

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio who now resides in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi-finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.

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March 22, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: acrobats, animals, blanket, CA, creative, dawn, fauna, fish, hill, lake, moon, nature, night, OH, poem, Poetry, Richard Luftig, secrets, sleep, stars, US, water, writing Leave a comment