Have you ever stood on a riverbank like an old Richard Nixon
just wondering where this hatred of the millions comes from?
No, I haven't either.
But I know they hated him before Watergate.
Poor Richard. Hiss was guilty after all.
Have you ever tied a worm to your line
with your back to a wide river
and thought about the fishpond back home?
Have you fallen in love with the blazing western sky?
When heaven is fanned by a flaming angel wing
falling from above to below.
Have you seen horizons no one will care about when you tell them?
The men that run Shanghai
don't want a city for human beings, they want a skyline.
They're not coming to my horizon. I won't ask them.
Have you ever glanced up at a few families in the picnic grounds
and wanted to say
"I'm not trying to be picturesque. I'm really fishing. This is really paradise."
Have you ever been on the river
on a stinkin hot full moon night
and heard the chorus of the cattle?
Have you heard a plover chase a sea-eagle, screaming like an angry fishwife?
Have you seen little Jack, aged about 7, jigging for herrings?
I bet he's thinkin, "When I'm a man
I won't be like that old bloke.
That bloke can't catch fish, money or women".

Fishing the Bellinger River at Mylestom
It comes surprising, like a swamp, just when the tide is slowing
the last half hour before the high, while you're looking west
along your line, back to the coast, you face the way it's going.
Behind you creeps the sludge from last week's floods, and then the river rests.

It wasn't brown a week ago, not when the rain was pouring,
not for four or more highs and lows. In fact it's never clearer.
The first few tides are bright and high, the river beach flowing
three feet deep, the water sweet, the beach become the river ...

Thirty minutes of despair
is highly recommended;
wet the pillow, curse the air
until your hope is mended.