like a fish on a hedge (or in a chain link fence)

AP news photo from Texas after hurricane Ike. but it reminds me of the first image in this poem:


My Name Is Donald

Like a fish on a hedge, the horsefly
Lands on my wife's lipstick.
That is sobriety.
That is the end of my hayride with oblivion.
I wonder: How long will it be until no one
Knows what a hayride is,
Or was? I've never been,
But the happiness I've seen in movies —
All the kids piled up in hay & a fiddler driving —
Is very real. It was real for a while.
Only a child can watch a movie sober.
He is younger than the mule pulling the wagon.
He is unshamed by the fiddler's expertise.
His birth trumps all, which is to say he's flying.


Donald Revell

The Cincinnati Review

Volume 3, Number 1
Summer 2006