You see a lightning bug
                        and think
   Shooting star!

Trout rise to cadmium-yellow
        sprawls of bug-body and gossamer wing
hatching at NBA playoff time
                        as they do every year,


   and slurp them off the brimming surface.


 I cast to brown trout in the birch pool
   while uphill somebody stays
        indoors and watches the game.


        Madison Square Garden
   reaches me
        through an open window.
The players, uniform on the T.V. screen
                          in blue-and-red, teal-and-white,
        swarm to the basket like feeding trout.

 

    —Richard Tillinghast

 

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Richard Tillinghast’s new book of poems, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and comes out this fall.



This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 Number 2, on page 36
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