Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I forgot what we were fighting over,
but at last you gave up and drifted
into the green net.
Then the passion began anew
in the stern of the canoe,
your fins erect,
your gills gaping like saber cuts.
My husband shook his head no.
After all we’d been through
I couldn’t keep you.
Men have always told me what to do.
I could hardly look at you,
tossing and turning.
How gold you were, how you shone,
as though you’d swallowed
rings and royal chains
and your entrails had forged them
into scales. You’d bent my rod tip
toward water, water, water . . .
You were both too big and too small:
in Minnesota, such are the limits,
such is the law, nuanced,
but structural, extending well below frost line
to rest upon the old black rock.
The law passes through us on its way
to the end of the universe.
We were paddling the Kawishiwi,
the river of many beaver houses,
those stick heaps gathered after
killing the little popple, accumulating
fresh white wooden femurs, beaver gnawed.
Underground a popple grove
is all the same tree, a nation of one,
a singular notion,
a discrete creation.
Popple is one idea in the world.
Another is the tooth of a beaver.
Another is my savageness.
Was it always there? Or is it just you?
We met and fell in love
over my lure, like Oberon and Titania.
You are the great king of the walleye
who could drink this river dry,
the potion of the Kawishiwi
that wakens our lust
for the next improbable creature we see.
You couldn’t be measured.
No one could get a rope on you.
Between us there was no mercy —
I’d have killed you
but for the law. My husband
untangled you, not me.
He teased out my hook
like a referee. He gave you back
your Kawishiwi.