WEBVTT

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Every year, I kind
of torture myself

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with an ice fishing
trip to Lake Erie.

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I live in Pennsylvania.

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And it's really a
very basic experience.

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A man drives you out on the
ice into the middle of the lake

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and chops a hole and puts
a little tent over you

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and kind of leaves
you there for a day.

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And he says he's
going to come back,

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and you hope to hell he does.

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And if really nothing, but
you can't see the shore

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and there's nothing but
the ice and the hole

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and the winter above you.

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And I never have
any luck at all.

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I just sit there and
freeze myself to death.

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And so this is a poem
about that business.

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It's called "Zimmer, the Luckless
Fisherman Dreams He is a Fish".

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"For two days, I
gazed on my lines

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through the cold rectangular
hole I had chopped in the ice.

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But my avid fingers felt
only the suffering of bait

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upon my hooks and discreet
shifting of the currents.

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No bites.

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No bites.

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And the hard wind pushed me.

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The cracking of the ice became
a thunder that frightened me.

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At night in the lodge, I dreamed
the transom above my door

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was a hole in ice.

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And I was a fish,
flicking through darkness,

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ignoring Zimmer's lines, his
bait, and all the cursing

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that he gave his luck
above me, all his ranting

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and sucking at his
whiskey bottle.

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I had but one thought repeating
in my cold silvery brain--

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Zimmer does not deserve me.

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Zimmer does not deserve me."

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