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    Mining the Light
    Mining the Light
    Mining the Light
    Ebook100 pages42 minutes

    Mining the Light

    By Keith Shein

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    About this ebook

    Mining the Light gathers thirty years of poetry focused on the outdoors. Fishing is what gets the poet to nature, but all that the natural world brings to light resides in the poems. Birth is there along with death, the ongoing richness of life, and the mystery of where we humans fit in, balancing as we must our time away from the natural world with our brief ventures into the wilderness. Poet, Keith Shein, has fly fished the rivers of the West and the saltwater of Key West. There’s a lifetime of experience and insight between the covers of Mining the Light.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu Publishing Services
    Release dateMay 5, 2015
    ISBN9781483429601
    Mining the Light

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      Book preview

      Mining the Light - Keith Shein

      —Thoreau

      BITS of LIGHT

      We say this with hands because there’s no other way.

      We say, I reach inside and come up empty.

      We’re never empty but we can feel that way. The brown

      trumpet vine puts out one last purple flower, and we

      shake our heads. A breeze shuts our eyes.

      Dying camellia blooms litter the sidewalk, and these

      can break a heart. We say the heart, but it’s not.

      It’s in our chests, near our hearts, but we don’t know what it is.

      The blooms look like the tossed corsages from a prom

      or flowers from a funeral at sea, though we know nothing’s lost

      because nothing’s kept, even if remembered.

      There’s a man running his hands over a pond. He seems

      to be saying, It’s all right, it’s going to be all right,

      and people look but not too long.

      I’d like to walk that bridge. I could paint and repaint

      the girders and cables so they never rust. I’d live in a shack

      down by the water and daily clean my brushes. Because we have

      no other way to think about it. Looking out of eyes, there’s a gap.

      The flight of a hawk lifts us and makes us wonder.

      We’re not the bird but the bird’s in our hearts. We are the bird:

      our seeing creates it, in a space that has no wind, no air, where

      the bird is not soaring. We can be lonely and lost inside ourselves,

      singing to others, the world, not knowing who’s calling, who hears.

      I’m on a river. Often in my mind I’m on a river. The dark water

      swirls around my legs and presses tight. My feet feel

      for a hold, then move on, touching, floating for another hold.

      Railroad trestles stand fallen in the stream, and spent mayflies

      cloud above the water. They shine as if they’ve swallowed

      bits of light, and the weight floats them down. When the fish strikes,

      my heart races, but that’s not what brings me to the water.

      There’s a hollow moment when the fish darts, pulling to get free.

      When I release the fish, it feels like I’m holding my own emptiness.

      When it fins away, I’m not any fuller or free, but I breathe, then, the river.

      KINGFISHER

      A truck rattles by, rumbling.

      Bird song follows, and it feels like it might rain.

      Then a kingfisher, solitary as always, lights

      on a snag in the river, just the two of us

      with the water between. The bird seems a sign,

      but so did the path that tangled in scrub.

      I could hear sound of the river through the branches—

      its smell like sour tea. Going back

      up, then, to go round, only to stumble down

      the nettled bank, and the path right there

      in the trees. Or the breath of wind caught in leaves,

      or a stone, the one colored one side

      like a mask and the other like a heart, cold,

      warming to the touch, but mute

      as things can be. Clouds, wind, the casts draw lines

      in the water, reach, disappear, swing

      and come up empty, the top the same as the bottom.

      When I look up from untangling a knot, the kingfisher

      has flown. But I know things I could not know,

      and cast and cast again.

      The line comes: if what we eat becomes us,

      what we crave are ghosts. The line comes tight.

      The fish gasps on the beach, but that’s not what

      turns me wild. It was the bird—believing

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