Natasha Trethewey for my father as it was that morning: drizzle needling settling around us—everything damp and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked you upstream a few yards, and out the river seeped in over your boots, All day I kept turning to watch you, how then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky you tried—again and again—to find skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps two small trout we could not keep. I thought about the past—working in my hands, each one slipping away that I tried to take it all in, record it when the time came. Your daughter, if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, that carried us out and watch the bank receding—
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