Barbel

As a boy I fished streams south of Oxford not much wider than a chair leg. We weighted our lures with lumps of lead, not thinking, and cast them within a foot of the far shore. Six-pound monofilament was dragged through the near-sky like a vapor trail. On holidays we’d venture with less hope to the inscrutable fathoms of the Thames, and load up a barbless hook with a ball of warm old cheddar. I settled for perch, small pike, mostly, but once on the Cherwell I wrestled what must surely have been a record barbel, some mud-hugging mustachioed beast that for twenty minutes moved the line over the river’s surface the way a glass is pulled about a Ouija board. When the line collapsed on me finally, it dissolved into the water like some new and florid calligraphy, a deflating, really shit poem, a dandelion head gone ruinously, marvelously, to seed.