1 Fish

The hero casts his fragile line,
daughter watching from creekside
as he hooks a rainbow trout.
Its slender body shimmers despite
the floundering and flopping
of wide-eyed screams
which slap at every ripple
of that frigid mountain stream.

The fisherman's prize emerges-
exhausted and dripping
sanguine from the muddied soup.
But what other purpose has she ever known
but to swim upstream and spawn new life
for a fisherman's tale
of the one that got away

but not this fish, not today.