"gone fishin'", on wiling away the afternoon watching my cork dip.

I tromped down the roadside, coming up to those granite boulders they use, the road people, some kind of anti-spoilage abutment or something, and I was going in a line next to those down past the milkweeds and other things.  The poke salad and stuff, flower-tassels like fingers reaching to grasp the air.

I come to the crick, by and by, a spit of clear water, run almost like the old dishwater would run in the extra line back in the day, clear and true like the brutal honesty of barking a shin or something.

There was an old bent-up trash drum, a democrat campaign ad, and an old tire, looking maybe of the old era buick lesabre or pontiac bonnevile kind, replete with the white stripe, and that with its own tiger line of dryrot running through it, real and true.

A brim had apparently committed "suicide by fisherman", and lay kaput near the edge of the weeds.  And me without my "sportsman gloves", I stuck a twig in its lazed mouth, between slack long-dead jowls, and lifted it, then flecked it into the clearwater, thinking somewhere down the way, a bottom feeder would have it.

I got the queerest feeling on, and got to glancing around, kind of addled, to eventually spot a turtle, seemingly looking at me askance with its yellow eyes, taking in every movement, every sound, every little footfall, rubber on creekbed, even while trying to pretend my person, as an interloper, was like The Man Who Was Not There.

And yet.

I hadn't even dipped my little earthworm in the clearwater yet.

Now I say the water was clear, and it mostly was, clear enough, for creekwater, but you could tell it was like some sort of really thin, weak tea, something watered down-like, as an iced tea maybe left in the hot car, where dogs and children would perish, the iced tea, the ice melts and it too, is no longer quite the same, like trying to tie the shoelaces of a heat-dead child.

I peed in the shade around the trees, the canopy of weird wet-spot hardwoods, big old sumbitches, like some maples and other, some stuff we don't usually see in our regular old sandy spits of wounded and dying dreams and so forth.

And the turtle was apparently having a kind of reflective moment, sedentary, profound, monolithic.  Part of the bad side of me thought to pinch its little tail between two fingers and fling the turtle dead into the middle of the creek, but I know the old story of the rabbit and the briar patch, and I thought the beast might like that.

I'd leave it in wonderment, such as I was partly in wonderment in return.  And I would also have my own sedentary turkey-leg moment of reflection, such that, as I began my day's fishing, was anyone having sex with the female supervisor?  Darnell the Lesser had a quip that amused me a lot, "I know who ain't."

But were they?

Penis and vagina chuck-a-ducking along in some dark corner, or even ankle to ears or what not.  The fish, as it were, had no answers, and in fact, it was only commentary, even their silence a commentary, mouths blah-ing along, pulling water, processing oxygen from water.

They would taste good rolled in meal and cooked in hot fat; consolation from the universe, perhaps, and it was a consolation that had to be enough, and a mystery left for another day.

It was like the discarded chapter of Bram Stoker, the so-called Dracula's Guest.  A freaking vampire pookah flea-flicking its tongue at Harker and all, the white snow, and all, that, and the encroaching night as relentless as anything, in league and conspiracy with time itself, an agreement, a back room deal to have its own portion of the harvest.

Or even, after the catch, dipped my pointer finger in the water, then abruptly sink it into the turtles unsuspecting meditative anus, just to see if the turtle could make speed, and those and other idle thoughts on a hot afternoon by the crick.

Anyway, a bucket of supper sitting in some dubious water.  

What it would amount to.

In the final analysis.

And a shit-flung excuse for an afternoon.