STRANGE BROTHER

A man came out at sunset in a boat
and rowing where the rapids are he stopped
beside me. There was something about his face
that seemed familiar. Where the water chopped
the pointed rocks, I saw his rod lay catgut
monotonously over the rubbed trace
of whitecaps. Silently, we fished together.
The intimate gestures of his arm and mine
were similar. A likeness in the twilight
narrowed the distance between our boats. My line
approximated his long cast, and the slight
turn of my wrist matched his. A parallel
of leaders snaked through the water and out again.
Twin heads and tails pulled from a wrinkled sky
agreed and were killed. There, where the day fell,
mangling itself upon that hill and to die,
the sun's last blood reflected on the gills.
The echoing oarlocks were exact. The doubled
images of heads and shoulders slumped;
for somewhere in the telling waters a troubled
mutation of myself fought to be still,
as that strange brother's fought ten feet from my boat,
there in the twilight, under the battered hill.