The Fisherman’s Map

For Phil


Across the wall hangs north-central Pennsylvania
washed in a light willow-green on white paper,
as if painted on flanks of birch, though
closer inspection reveals the paper merely old,
the snakes and whirlpools contour lines.
Still, it’s a wilderness to contemplate
between fly ties, or late-night winters,
when the house crouches too close. Far away
the precise graphs of roadbed gradients,
the tune of the mortgage pinging the roof,
for he knows in that green dome, fabulous
configuration of waters, thin hairline
blue moss cushion of creeks and rivers,
that there is a trout so wild, so
remote no fisherman could find it.
He imagines it visible in some sky pool,
its rose-stippled stomach, embered evening,
its yellow speckles, a cupful of stars—
there and not there below a tumbled
shelf of water, the sheer white jets
of some fall—the trout, unattainable.
Every cast he has ever laid
in the corner of a pool has been a failed
try at origins. Now nowhere,
far away from the jeep-trailed woods,
the fisherman’s camps, the bushwhacked
briared paths, he dreams of it
in the somewhere of the denseness
of the map’s correspondences, ideal
platonic realm of the irrational,
primitive maelstrom blueprinted
for consultation, tacked firmly
against the wall, surrounded by books,
computer screens, the civilized
geometry of doors, windows, vents.