catching rainbow trout for dinner.

She hands me her pole and I don’t

ask, just slide a hook through the body

of a worm. She casts into the sparkle, her face

focused as she jerks and reels. It’s big enough

for dinner, big enough to begin her unfolding

in these mountains away from

her father. Around him she folds herself up

small as the heart of a trout. I don’t mind

cleaning her fish, wipe my hands down

my jeans, the shimmer evidence of something

I can do. Knife prick into soft

belly and up toward the gills like

a line we would draw if we had any

power to draw that kind of a line.

We just learned

he is only the grass bent low

under a snail, or the length

of the song from a crow’s beak

to the place where you can’t

hear it anymore. Who would listen

anyway to the prayers we cried

into our pillows at night, those years

when our father had to leave Wyoming

for work? His empty seat at our ballgames,

empty seat at dinner as we sat around

mom’s casseroles. We found out

how ache can grow

under skin like fire

that tore up the Black Hills, and everyone

watching from their porches praying

for the peaks to be saved, but I have to

believe those flames might have been

the land troubling itself

in her own kind of prayer.