American Us

—for those crazy Noodlers

He beats chest, a usually shy adolescent,

sporting new Sean John b-ball cap, raising

a catfish, his body length, to be on camera.

No one could call him pusillanimous since

his father taught him the hundred year old

art, where a subculture of bare-handed badasses

search the dirk-ridden cubby-holes of muddy

waters, avoiding teeth, feeling for gums and

whiskers of flat-heads in a soupy darkened bank

of Oklahoma’s sub-earth, were the two-toned

black and silver fish hide and wait to bite arms

of the men foolish enough to Catfist. This a place

where all sons dream in watercolor. Men here

are men—good ole boys with protruding cheeks

full of snuff, wearing five gallon hats or Nascar

caps, jaw-yapping about copperhead bites, or

letting a flat-head loose to mar the forearm into

a permanent tattoo of scar tissue. The brave ones

have signed up at Bob’s Pig Shop for the huge

contest, where the young boy sees his father as

a warrior with water—loving every soaked fiber

of his Dad’s favorite Wranglers, or Levi’s, letting

the murky water lease him for an integer in time,

until long black whiskers slap and wrap up his

elbow like wet shoestrings. A father owns a smile,

and his son extols his infection, and smiles new.