Issue Thirty-Four - Summer 2019

Candle Ice

By Eric Heyne

Candle ice slips in sheets off the shelf
over the river where it sneaks out into Lower
Tangle. Small grayling gang the shallows
for what floats by, old lake trout hover
in deeper water for stray unwary grayling,
and our waders double as overgrown
breakup boots making us fluent in all terrains
and dangerous to the fish (we think).
So many things to be discovered then:
the fit of our bodies against the tent floor contours,
what it meant to love without competing,
the few roads and many long roadless views
we could cover and yet never run out of
(we thought). The best time to fish this spot,
with jigs bouncing like waterlogged grubs
from fast water to still, is just when the seasons
are flipping over, first open water like this
and the first freezing days a few whole months away.

Copyright 2019 Heyne

Eric Heyne has been living and teaching in Alaska for the last 30 years. He has previously published poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bird's Thumb, Cirque, Platte Valley Review, Eclectica, and elsewhere. He also has published articles on the theory of the fiction/nonfiction distinction, American literature, and northern and Alaskan literature, in Critique, Narrative, Modern Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and River Teeth, among others. He is currently pursuing publication of a poetry collection entitled Fish the Dead Water Hard.

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