By GARY METRAS
A cloud drifting over the house tonight
is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite,
large, long, and singular, crawling through
the waters of dark sky. Its pincers as real
as anything as they search for sustenance,
another bug, a just hatched rainbow trout
wriggling in delicious currents along the belt
of Orion. It will munch its way through
this life, or the one imagined by star gazers
and fly fishermen, who are not so inseparable
from other dreamers in history
or in books. And when that bug of cloud
swam on by, its spiny abdomen of wispy
vapors like gill fringes breathing what is
offered, it left behind a moon as full and
round as a salmon egg, its shining imbued
with the DNA of survival and hope for all
species, insecta, star, and human alike.
Gary Metras is the author of Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems, which won the Split Oak Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and the long poem Francis d’Assisi 2008, which was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. His new book of poems, Captive in the Here, is due from Cervena Barva Press. He is the letterpress printer and editor for Adastra Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
