Editor’s Note: This is reprinted from last month, as the poem was omitted from print.
You asked, where’s the poem that goes with the poetry column last month? Here it is, along with the column again:
Harry Humes died this last April. Harry, who taught at Kutztown (PA) university, was a true poet. What I mean by that is that fame was low on his agenda; getting the poem right was high. He was a passionate fisherman and a generous man. He asked if he could publish my first little chapbook when I didn’t even know what a chapbook was.
The poem happens on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday (this year it’s Feb. 17), traditionally a feasting day to use up the rich foods before the fasting of Lent. Fish, however, is often permitted during Lent. The word “shrive” means to confess, to confess our sins and be given absolution. That becomes important in an oblique way at the end of the poem.
The speaker must be on the second floor of his house, warmed by a stove and tying flies. The scene is so perfectly rendered that we’re there with him.
It’s quiet, not even his cat Vivaldi ( Can you hear music? I can.) is around; he’s surrounded by what he needs for the flies. He’s there for hours, so concentrated that the room itself seems to sway with the maples, kind of a dream state.
In that semi-dream state, he sees water under the ice, under roots of trees along the water, catching what’s drifting along. The light seems to bend. At this point he looks out at his neighbor shoveling, clearing his lane.
The final four lines help the reader know the roots of this poem, what seemed to have brought it to the surface. It was the smokehouse door swinging back and forth—something not fastened as it should be, but also, and importantly, right at the end: “some old warning about fish.”
What’s lodged in his mind is very old. It’s probably his old religious training about not eating fish on Shrove Tuesday. He probably doesn’t believe in that prohibition now (or maybe never did), but still, an old feeling of doing something not allowed has crept into his mind and given him a catch in the throat.
The poem is slow and quiet. When things are slow and quiet, old feelings can arise. There’s nothing sudden or startling in this poem. It simply offers us a mood, by way of the title and by naming so many of the objects that we could be there ourselves.
Harry was not unsung as a poet. He won the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press, the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, the 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and in 1998, his manuscript, “Butterfly Effect” was chosen for the prestigious National Poetry Series.
Harry died in April, 2025, at the age of 89.