Kelly Terwilliger

Poetry

Kelly Terwilliger is the author of two collections of poetry and a forthcoming book combining poetry, painting, and prose. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain. She will have an award-winning poem travelling around on buses on Guernsey this summer, and a residency at PLAYA has furthered her work on a collaborative manuscript about swimming in wild places. She teaches and performs as an oral storyteller in public schools in Eugene, Oregon.

 

Fishing Trip

My friend went fishing and didn’t catch a fish. Didn’t even catch the photograph of the bighorn sheep leaping on the hillsides, leaping into each other’s heads as if to become the best idea there. Stars swirling and the sound of impact rocketing down to the river water moving, thick, implacable, cold, the hidden fish inside it, their shiny eyes, their glitter sides turning and turning, moving like shuttles down through the weft of water ropes. My friend returned, empty-handed but he wore the wide space home. He knows the fish are there. Now even I can hear them swimming.

“ This was not my story, not my fishing trip. But in a small lunchroom far away from rivers, the story entered me, became part of my inner landscape, and emerged again shaped by what I felt there. Another version. I gave it back to the fisher who saw how I had heard him. Poetry is full of uncaught fish that keep swimming through us. ”

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