i.m. Robert Adamson

The sky was white and patched with ultramarine as we set out

in your runabout. Crossing Flint and Steel, you shouted

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery!

Anchored off West Head under a gun battery

like a stone hide for twitchers, we fed pilchard cubes

into an oil slick, a metallic sheen that fanned away

on the tide. Your last words on a postcard from 1983:

tight lines! found form again as slimy mackerel,

their bodies bar-coded for camouflage, surfaced,

throwing scales. Poetry was there, of course, ruminating

in plain sight. You understood that saying the name

of a bird or fish was enough to fan the ineffable

into flame. You cupped your mouth with your hands

and made the call of a Barking owl. Downriver, a dog

responded, twice. While I’d entered the gloom

of stillness in a pond Ted Hughes recalled, in Pike,

and Richard Hugo’s Trout had sides like apples in fog,

you were the first fishing poet I’d met. You crafted poems

the way you fashioned fishing rods. Having sourced

the finest materials, you arranged them on the work

bench of your desk, binding runners with thread before

applying coats of clear varnish with a fine brush.

You could read conditions so well, I once heard you

predict, successfully, a species prior to casting

as you’d broken the codes of location, moon

and tide phase. As we drifted in black air, the bait tank

aswirl with bubbles and yellowtail, you slipped the reel

into free spool, gave line, then lifted the rod to set

the hook and guide a mulloway like double-plated,

flexing chrome into the net. Friend, mentor, adviser

when it came to all things finned and winged,

there’s a line-break I can’t fix. Tonight the clouds

are glowing from crane and coal-feeder lights

at the port. I’ll post this from the end of the break wall,

which might as well be the ground below any pylon

on the Brooklyn rail bridge.

Anthony Lawrence

Notes: Flint and Steel: a reef on the Hawkesbury river.  
Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery!  is from ‘Angel from Montgomery’ by John Prine.