By Micah Daniel McCrotty
Two boys had come through small corridors
and fissures, tall ceilings between narrow
tubes of mud and rock to find the streambed
a half mile down in the cave where the lowest
runnels flattened and the passage opened
to a pool’s edge, translucent as a mule’s eye,
darters hiding from their headlamps among
snail shells and sand-streaked currents.
Walls dripped with refracted light, slick
gullies of flowstone ran by braided sheets
throughout the cavern way into tangled
grooves carved like wave lengths.
One boy motioned to a dark shape pressed against
the far wall: a channel cat steady in the stream,
its long gray body hovering, its shadow
spotlit by their headlamp’s pointed gaze.
Time had slowed in the milk-water
globes of its eyes and near its nose hung
several broken whiskers, scentless as a photograph,
each scarred and stubby white tipped antennae
searching flattened riffles and sun-poor pools,
and when they returned two days later
they found the fish still holding in its cell,
undisturbed as a fly line snaked above its head.
Micah Daniel McCrotty lives near Piedmont, Tennessee. His poetry has previously appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and The Fourth River among others. Find Micah Daniel McCrotty’s Instagram here.
