This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
It's the long holiday weekend—time to head outdoors, maybe get a little fishing in. It's a great way to escape the day-to-day, right?
Nature writer Harry Middleton argues otherwise: "Fishing is not an escape from life, but often a deeper immersion into it."In today's poem, "Fishing All Evening at Raccoon Creek Park after the Rain," Mike Good seems to agree with Middleton, but not in a way you might expect.
Mike Good’s debut poetry collection, "Rung by Rung," is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. He has been published in Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He Previously the managing editor at Autumn House Press, Mike now works in nonprofit development and as a book reviewer. Born in southwestern Pennsylvania, he lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, child, and two dogs.
Today's poem is set at Raccoon Creek, a 7,752-acre, Pennsylvania State Park in Beaver County, close to the state’s western border with West Virginia and Ohio. In the poem, the narrator finds himself lost—on more than one level.
Here’s "Fishing All Evening at Raccoon Creek Park after the Rain" by Mike Good.
Fishing All Evening at Raccoon Creek Park After the Rain
Lord knows we’ve been lost here before,
after we stumbled to the lake from that woodland
trail, green in its Pennsylvania-wet.
We did not catch a fish worth keeping,
but they were biting hard. I threw a perch back,
tearing barbs from gills, its face snagged
on my hook, still fighting, a trail of scales on my fingertips
left over from the cheek I’d stolen. The fish swam lopsided into the shallows,
its abdomen sunlight, iris blades raking across its back.
Then the sky clearing. Then raindrops dimpling the lake’s surface.
On our drive back, the moon opened wide,
mouthing at Venus, and I felt so far from the world
that I wanted to become it. I wanted to eat a large fish,
charred and crisp, wrapped in tin foil, cooked over red oak embers. I wanted
to give the perch its cheek back, to shut down every light
in this sorry starless city, where I return again and again.
I wanted to swallow the empty sky, to hold it sacred,
its bitter breath in my teeth. But instead, it was me, a dog,
an incandescent neighborhood near a city park,
as dark as city can be, drifting hungry and lost, like a perch
that has seen a sliver of the moon and a planet flickering
in the distance, and, wanting nothing more than to hold the awful
candle deep inside its chest, instead clutching nothing,
but itself, thrown mutilated, falling hungry into the terrible burning night.
Originally appearing in Birdfeast, "Fishing All Evening at Raccoon Creek Park After the Rain"
is forthcoming in Mike Good's debut poetry collection, "Rung by Rung" (CavanKerry Press, May 2027).
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Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.