A fishing trip on Two Medicine River sounds like the plainest subject a poet could pick, and Ralph A. Micken treats it plainly, walking us through one day from the shade of the cottonwoods to the dusk of the trail home. Yet the poem keeps a second story running beneath the surface. It is about being a visitor in a landscape that is generous, drowsy and alive, and about what happens when two human beings arrive in it carrying hooks.
The opening lines set the terms. The men wade "through thick, live air," a phrase that makes the heat feel almost solid, something to be pushed through. The cottonwoods "murmured contentedly," their trunks "all warm / With sunlight which the leaves invited down." Everything here is hospitable and half asleep. Even the rattlesnake, the one creature we might expect to be a threat, is "tolerant" and "lazy," and he "flowed from his coil" instead of striking or slithering. Micken gives the place a mood of easy permission, and the people who enter it seem at first to be part of that ease. Bill's tangled fishing line is a small comic moment, and the berry bush's "deft fingers" are a neat reversal: nature, not the fisherman, turns out to be the clever hand.
The middle of the poem is its technical centre, and it is written with a fisherman's attention. The tone changes here, because the language becomes brisk and practical. "Flies haven't worked so well; let's try live bait" is almost the only direct speech apart from "Got a strike!", and the plainness of the talk matches the plainness of the act. The grasshoppers are "stalked with cautious clumsiness" and "deftly slipped over the cruel curve of hooks." The word "cruel" is the poem's one open judgment, and it sits quietly inside a line that otherwise sounds like instruction. The same restraint governs the catch itself. The fight is described with something close to tenderness, "a yielding and a drawing in of line," until the "rainbow sides draw near, flash bright." Then comes the turn: the fish is "held exultantly for show, / Then pounded fiercely on the rock till dead." The beauty of the rainbow trout and the blunt violence of its ending are set side by side with no comment. Micken lets the reader feel the gap between "exultantly" and "pounded" without explaining it.
The poem is written in unrhymed, loosely iambic lines of varying length, closer to speech than to song. Several lines run on across breaks, and the rhythm stretches and slackens as the action does: long and unhurried while the men wade, clipped during the strike, spent at the end. The absence of rhyme suits the subject. A neat rhyme scheme would make the day feel tidy and resolved, and the poem's unease comes from the fact that it doesn't resolve.
The final section is where the poem earns its weight. Once "the biting stops," the light drains out of the scene, and the sun's warmth, so generous in the opening, is now "deserted." The trees that "murmured contentedly" are "gray" and "tired from revel," "sagging" like guests after a long party. The gnats, once part of a bright "dance," now whine "forlornly in the air gone aloof." The landscape has not turned hostile, but it has withdrawn, as if the day's enjoyment had been shared with the men and then taken back. The nighthawk dropping "mere inches from the earth" and the "sleepy sound of frogs, deep and sweet" bring the poem to rest on sounds the men did not make and do not control.
That is what gives the poem its quiet significance. Micken never moralises about fishing, and he clearly knows its pleasures. But by framing the catch between a warm, welcoming morning and a cooling, indifferent dusk, he suggests that the trout's death costs something, and that the place goes on without us.