Green River Poem by Oran Brucks

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Green River
The Green River ran like poured glass,
Cold with a mountain's memory,
Clear enough to count the stones
Resting deep beneath its skin.
Long green ribbons of current slipped
Between cedar shadows and leaning firs,
While deep holes held their secrets—
Dark kingdoms where the great Trout waited,
Motionless as old spirits beneath the roaring flow.
Morning rose softly upon the water.
Mist curled from the river like breath,
And the cry of eagles echoed downstream,
Sharp against the waking hills.
Ravens answered with their crooked laughter,
Mocking the fisherman's hopeful casts
As though they knew the river better
Than any man ever would.
The fly line snickered through the guides,
A whispering song of graphite and silk,
Each cast unfurling like a prayer
Across the boiling emerald current.
The angler stood alone in the moving water,
Boots rooted against the river stones,
Watching sunlight shatter into silver
Across riffles and seams and pools.
From the far bank came the sudden bark
Of otters voicing their displeasure,
Scolding his brazen intrusion
Of hook and feather in their hunting grounds.
They vanished in a slick brown ripple,
Leaving only widening rings behind.
Hours drifted with the current.
A rise here.
A missed strike there.
The brief trembling weight of life on the line,
Then silence once again.
Yet no disappointment lingered.
For the joy lived not in the catching,
But in the standing there at all—
In the river's endless music,
In the cedar wind,
In the wheeling ravens overhead,
And in the feeling that for one bright day
The world had narrowed perfectly
To water, sky, and the cast.
As evening settled gold upon the Green River,
The angler reeled in slowly,
I'll be back, he mutters, listening one last time,
To the fly line coiling back through the guides.
The deep holes darken beneath the bubbling current,
Still guarding their unseen Trout
While somewhere beyond the trees
The eagles cry one last time again
While ravens laugh into the dusk