Grandpa’s Tackle Box

The thickened air was cold as
permafrost as we picked through
87 years of accumulation,
sentimental trilobites wrapped in
the papery shale of lived years.

In a far corner, under an eave,
sat a tackle box, metallic green
mottled with rust, the colors of
duckweed trapped in the corner of
a pond full of brim.

Opened, the layered trays creaked — joints
almost as frozen as Grandpa’s
aged knees. The box was a small
galaxy of rusted hooks, bobbers,
plugs and needle nose pliers.

The tangle brought back his hours of
help with my middle school science
project, a model cell — Golgi bodies,
mitochondria, and the sticky
sounding endoplasmic reticulum.

An embalmed night crawler lays across
both a red-headed bass plug and a
leopard frog endowed with two trebles,
somehow having escaped our old tin
worm can. It crumbled at my touch.

My earliest memory, us walking back
from Uncle Jake’s pond. I didn’t
even reach four feet and he remarked
“The stringer’s heavy, let me carry it.
We had a good day, didn’t we?”

Verse Virtual, June 2022