“Dolly Trout Slayers”
This poem is a small story of my marriage and survival after the breakup. My husband did not like fishing, so he never knew the water of Kootenay Lake as he should have. He claimed that whatever he did not know, I could not know. It baffled him to think of any other reality. About twenty years after the end of the marriage, I found myself in a seaworthy fishing boat catching Trout and Kokanee Salmon on Kootenay Lake. I spotted the pictographs on a rock wall, the ones he always wanted to see but probably never did, because he would have had to hike hard to find them. By then, he had given up on life. I felt sorry for him, then, as what I had accomplished in some small way, he could never own.
I usually always write poetry, and the form suits me for most creations. I have tended to avoid fiction, but I am recently beginning to enjoy writing in that genre. I also write a lot in creative nonfiction, which is a sort of relative to poetry; you just need to examine what ‘process’ works best for getting the lyrical punch in a work.