Text Box: Channel Cat You said that dad always liked to take you fishing. You had the patience to sit and wait and watch. Crowds of words didn't chatter in your head and the squawk of crows was enough to settle your need for language. Your landscape was rural and as factual as a barbed hook. Your talent was observation and from the fishing camp in upward look you knew every girder and rivet in Jordon’s Bridge. The low drone of tires biting into the grate of bridge road plate were notes in your margins of ring-worn cylinders and asbestos brakes, raining down fiber and fumes into your lungs. And the tart purple-black of the elderberry growing wild in the shrub and brush behind you set upon your plate the small hard seed of being. You spit washed the world. And the lines of slender death that you and dad cast out held a spell into the river conjuring the Channel Cat. I remember you saying how you once closed your eyes and envisioned the whiskered fish coming up through the mud and silt. And how you leapt up expecting to hear a reel go screaming and see a flash of hands grab a pole to set the hook--but there was only dad bottle fallen from his hand mumbling to himself about the war. And you settled back to watch rainbows in thin film of oil floating by from dump of barge bilge water. Being was enough for you, you had no apprenticeship in the shop of asking why. When evening settled out of light, your play was the snapping of the fire and the certain beauty of the stars. And without a word you would crawl into the bed of the old pickup and sleep and dream of barges, their deep draft sucking the river under them revealing the slope of shore to channel. And of the long wide throat which swallows everything; the infinite gullet of the Channel Cat. And you would headless turn in the sleepy hollow of your hard bed and see in swirls and eddies of consciousness the yellowing pages of years drift under the bridge, and your children born. And grandpa, and grandma, and dad, and mom, and your beloved uncle Carl wrapped into the Channel Cat's whiskers. And you would awaken one half century later to the screaming reel of now feeling the swelling in your neck, and tumors schooling in your lungs. Oh my brother the Channel Cat is rising Hold tight, hold tight , hold tight… ©2003 Dan Kantak