Water Music

David told me that years ago I said:
‘Fishing a Canadian lake is Mozart,
ocean fishing is Wagner.’ Now I think
in a storm, the Saint Lawrence River
is Götterdämmerung, some streams
trill Scarlatti, run into head waters,
where I have fished for Gluck,
Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich.
I caught nothing. I still keep fishing
in musical waters: I caught a perch
in a Chinese Lake that was Puccini,
looked exactly like a perch
from the Ashokan Reservoir.
I trapped crustaceans in the River Thames, Purcell –
his flowing theatre and sacred music,
not far from Devil’s Acre. A little north,
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