Every year, I kind of torture myself
with an ice fishing trip to Lake Erie.
I live in Pennsylvania.
And it's really a very basic experience.
A man drives you out on the ice into the middle of the lake
and chops a hole and puts a little tent over you
and kind of leaves you there for a day.
And he says he's going to come back,
and you hope to hell he does.
And if really nothing, but you can't see the shore
and there's nothing but the ice and the hole
and the winter above you.
And I never have any luck at all.
I just sit there and freeze myself to death.
And so this is a poem about that business.
It's called "Zimmer, the Luckless Fisherman Dreams He is a Fish".
"For two days, I gazed on my lines
through the cold rectangular hole I had chopped in the ice.
But my avid fingers felt only the suffering of bait
upon my hooks and discreet shifting of the currents.
No bites.
And the hard wind pushed me.
The cracking of the ice became a thunder that frightened me.
At night in the lodge, I dreamed the transom above my door
was a hole in ice.
And I was a fish, flicking through darkness,
ignoring Zimmer's lines, his bait, and all the cursing
that he gave his luck above me, all his ranting
and sucking at his whiskey bottle.
I had but one thought repeating in my cold silvery brain--
Zimmer does not deserve me.
Zimmer does not deserve me."