Trout Fishing: Richard Brautigan Poems by Alan Catlin

Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America

Winter leaks from the cracked tar
sealing around the carbon stained brick
chimney forming puddles of sludge and
ash along with the spilled hurricane lamp
oil; opening notes in a cacophonous
symphony of dripping-from-a-neglected
metal-roof. The forest at dawn ablaze,
a still life framed by the cracked window
glass of isolated cabin, flies buzzing
inside, worrying the remains, meals left
to fester, fishing rods and hunting rifles
unattended, propped up near the barred-
from-inside-door. Invisible fires burn,
stoked in the cold, desolate hearth,
releasing ghosts of smoke burning down
to cold absorbent stone, taking within
the very essence of unnatural heat and light;
the spent pistol shell, crumpled pages from
a manuscript no one will ever read.

Richard Brautigan’s Last Hurrah

There are
times

when the only
thing

between us
and death

is an incongruous
image
like

A Mexican
sombrero
balanced

at a rakish
angel on a
medieval suit

of armor

or an empty
shot glass
held out

in the extended
hand of a
mechanical monkey

or
of a bald ceramic
Shirley Temple

Pull-the-chord
she-sings-
doll

crooning
Melancholy Baby

or a chambered
round in a
handgun resting

beside a defunct
cuckoo clock

on a bullet
riddled mantle
piece

bent clock hands
stuck on four
thirty

Or
an installation
of empty

Black Jack
Daniels

bottles laid out
in a row
balanced side by side

spent sparklers
and dried flowers

completing the picture
entitled:

DO NOT DISTURB
the artist
is resting

The Brautigan Chair

An unmatched dining
room chair, a relic from
a marriage gone bad,
an unfunded job at Montana U,
shot full of holes
in drunken rage and
left in a friend’s garage
gradually falling completely
apart, a sort of keepsake
of days gone by, lives lost.

Smoking Trout

in Brautigan
Big Sky country
using a discarded
refrigerator
for the deed
until Captain
Richard named
the cabinet
Auschwitz
leaving a bad
taste that cannot
be removed

Trout Fishing in America’s

cover: a long-haired hippie
and his woman, suggested
the Aquarian Age, Woodstock,
Free Love, drugs, rock n roll,
all the good things the sixties
had to offer we were leaving
behind in the new dark ages
of Nixon, Altamont, Charlie
Manson, wars of containment
by attrition, police state riot
gears, Maxwell’s silver hammer
of death, all the baggage DC
carried within him as a silent
soon-to-be-killer, a suicidal
disease no one recognized
until it was way too late.
He picked up my Brautigan, sd.,
“These people look really
blissed out. Happy and free.”
Lifted the book along with
the poetry text he was borrowing
for a class he’d attend on
different drugs determined by
phases of the moon, all his
favorite rock stars dead or dying
along the twisted mined super-
highway in his head that divided
him in two like some kind of
blacktopped Mekong swollen by
monsoon and atrocity kills he felt
obligated to explore, fishing with
hand grenades, hot shrapnel in his
brain, a lure for later, when life
got seriously fucked driving blind
and crazy, way beyond alcohol
and drugs. When all the shit hit
I wondered how far into the trout
stream he had gone and which dead
rock star was going with him
to that no exit place of no U-turns,
no reverse, no get out of jail free