Sucker Brook was only fish part of the time.
It was always crayfish and shale and a copper-colored bed.
It was hellgrammites. It was tiny leeches
between puckered toes after wading an entire afternoon.
It was never dipping a line in that water even once-
instinct never registering in my boyhood
mind to do anything else but wade in it, play in it,
scrape my knees on its rocks.
In me was a greedy curiosity for water, for the outdoors,
for the uncharted backwoods bird, animal, fish-filled places
where I felt hidden.
But water spoke the loudest-
wooed me before dawn, straight through lunch and dinner
and on into firefly evenings.
Matt Smythe hails from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man, where this poem first appeared.
What’s happening at VetRep…
Catch our interview this week with Jeff Bosley on the Savage Wonder Podcast here.
Tickets are going fast for the Parlor this season, reserve your seats for Woody Allen’s Central Park West here before they sell out! For the month of June we will be opening Central Park West with the winner of our inaugural 10-minute play competition, Fifteen Dead Souls, by Leilani Squire.
We are currently offering multiple dates for our online and in-person Playwriting for Veterans classes, and our Acting for Beginners class is now being offered weekly every Saturday from 10am-12pm. Scholarships for qualifying veterans, as well as multi-class passes are available. Registration details can be found here.
One of my favorite poems. Just transported me.