Fishing in Vain Limnophiles, or, Ode to Fanny

Today, I searched for the giant squid in Lake Fanny Hooe, which is inappropriately phallic and rife with pulpy peat. A little rubble, too. Legend tells us that the “real” Fanny Hooe drowned right where the lake’s corpus cavernosum would be, if it weren’t for all that peat. Her ghost apparently croons about copper mines and homemaking and losing one’s footing while picking blueberries too close to a lake, and garters sewn of pondscum, and lipstick, but all I heard were the sharp-shin hawks screaming their way into the wood ducks, pulling their breasts from their sternums in strings that reminded me of the Matthäus Ignatz Brandstätter 1824 Viennese violin on which Beethoven’s Ninth was first performed, that Hooe played the morning before her death—the fingerboard ebony, the saddle rounded, the ribs quarter-cut maple and so terribly hard. I patted myself on the back for leaving the cat at home, safe from the raptors on the back of the orange couch, which she bites when sexually frustrated, and when the garbage truck comes. I cast, and wondered about my own F-holes; if, like those of Hooe’s Brandstätter, they’re just small notches cut into spruce, or something more—something goozy and ventricular. In my head, I made a checklist of the differences between steamer trunks and hope chests, the water in our lungs, and in our mouths. I caught half a fish, the tail of which I couldn’t identify. It was yellow-gold. I imagined the head in the mouth of the ghost and felt, for the first time in months, a passenger train in my chest, this tentacular strophe, severed and part of a larger order, phantasmagorically gummed, implacable joy.