---

How to capture a cutty’s pickle-shine?
I don’t try. This newbie to colored pencils
relies on lots of hues in faint layerings
and the luck of mistakes from grabbing

the wrong pencils, and guesses the fishiness
of the overall thing will make you imagine
its wetness, its still-breathing nature, plus
other missing items in the source photo:

the stream, the rocks, her crouch, her gear,
her bright red bandana, blue cap, that long
tress over her left shoulder, her bright,
beaming face. I keep it simple: a trout,

two hands, some rolled up sleeves, and
leave only the faint outline of a droplet
on her right index finger, the drip about
to lose its grip. An outline for the drop

because I have forgotten to color it in:
no fill, colorless but for the paper’s buff.
I tell myself a proper lazy artist must leave
work for the viewer, allow them to create

in that small bead worlds that magnify
a fish’s spots and reflect a brooklet’s
massaged stones, the time-defying water,
a young angler’s knee kissing bedrock.

 

Ron Drummond is the author of Why I Kick at Night (Portlandia). A founding editor of Barrow Street, his poetry and translations have appeared in over forty journals, as well as in multiple anthologies and textbooks. He has been awarded fellowships from Ragdale, VCCA, Blue Mountain and the Macondo Foundation. He lives in New York with his husband, Terry Cook.