Loon Song

My father reads pond ripples like tea leaves and speaks six thousand
thirty two dialects of bass. We ease out in the pink and the fog,

passing a flask of coffee between us. I say fishing is like
Vegas. He points at yesterday’s moon, still pocking the sky.

The loons are yodeling the same oak tune they’ve yodeled
for seventy million years. Mid-cast, he admits he can’t hear them.

Can’t hear my daughter, and the chainsaw
of her why- why- why-ing, and later, once we’ve pulled

the canoe back onto the grass, and gutted and scaled the bass,
and eaten them, stuffed with bay leaves, he can’t hear

a single thread of the conversation gathering fire
by the fire he’s tending at the edge of Swan Pond,

four generations huddled. Just the braid of it.
He sways in his own time.

So, no. We don’t talk like we used to,
needle on vinyl late into the night.

But, here. My head on his shoulder
as we smolder out the fire together,

language maybe older,
even older than the loons.