“Fishing Deering Pond” for Mousam Way Land Trust
by Michael Stanley
Jan, 2022
Fishing Deering Pond
My singing bowl’s this Johnboat’s hull. It sounds
like pinging collection plates against the ground’s
excited gravel late one Sunday morning as we
travel over worn-out trails tracking around
a pine-trimmed pond’s rail that sank
into the bog a few years back.
From the bank a bullfrog scoffs, “Your line’s still slack.” My
bobber tightly keeps corked a pollen-patinaed
lightly lily-laced surface from cracking open
and spilling out heaven’s reflection to stain
what flowering highbush blueberries remain
atop a lichen-crusted, craggy cropping.
The plopping of a painted turtle pair startles the daze
out of me. Mosquito bites begin to itch. I twitch
the bamboo’s twine to pop that worm into the weeds.
Unwilling to concede I’m skunked, I plunk a lure
sure enough to hook that stump. My Johnboat bumps
the rotting roots, echoing so far across Deering
that my father’s father’s father’s boyhood’s hearing
it and looking out for storms on the edge of a perfect day.
Michael Stanley grew up in a small town in Maine with a love of brooks and books. After graduating from Harvard College he pursued a medical doctorate from the Tufts-Maine Track Program. Currently he is a senior resident at Mass General Brigham Neurology. He has written poems and lyrical stories in The Kalahari Review and Christian Century, as well as for medical initiatives including a children’s book for Shriners Hospitals for Children, a cartoon for the It Gets Brighter Campaign at Oxford University, and a lyrical appeal for The Financial Times’ seasonal campaign for Alzheimer’s research. The National Humanities Center has featured him twice for his work in the medical humanities and the role the arts & letters play in medical lives.
The Sanford Springvale Mousam Way Land Trust (mousamwaylandtrust.org) is a nonprofit, community oriented organization dedicated to the permanent protection of local land for the benefit of the public and future generations as well as providing livable habitat for present and future generations of humans, plant and animal life in the Sanford, Maine area. It does this without cost to the town through public education and protection of significant natural resources, farmland, historic areas and scenic vistas and by working with landowners who seek to protect their land through conservation easements or by transfer of deed to the Land Trust.