Mending the Net, by Barbara Daniels

Mending the Net, by Thomas Eakins (USA) 1881.

Mending the Net
                                     
A tree drops a shadow that stains the newspaper 
a man is reading. It’s chilly where he sits 
on a wooden pallet, his back to the picture plane. 

I’m guessing he looks like my father reading 
while he buttoned his shirt, book propped 
on his dresser. The man in the painting 

wears a dark suit, shoes, and a hat (as my 
father did). The pallet he sits on and 
the capstan next to him fix him in position. 

Blue at the top of the water-soaked sky 
fades to white. A smudge of smoke drifts 
from a distant boat. The tree must be older 

than the man. Its dead branches reach left 
and right. Green deepens at the lower edge 
of its canopy. I page through books, 

a birdbook to see what birds might have 
been there and a guide to trees to find one 
that keeps on leafing though half of it is dead. 

At the left the horizon rises a little, lifts 
working men above the man reading. 
There’s only one net, the net, but the men 

who mend it are separate, meditative, not really 
talking though I imagine they hear voices 
from boats off shore and the clamorous 

calls of willets and yellowlegs. Blurred shapes 
of geese curve in every direction. Each time 
I count I get a different total—Are there ten? 

And look—girls I didn’t see at first, one 
in a white blouse so bright it links her to 
white shirts of men who arc toward each other. 

The legs of the girl in the white blouse are 
bare in the April chill but the other girl (is she 
her sister?) wears bright red stockings that link her

to the sun-reddened faces of the workmen. My father 
taught me every kind of work has equal dignity. Am I 
the girl in red stockings and black boots looking up 

at men working, my arm out, reaching?  Or am I 
my father, a person who can’t stop reading 
beneath the outstretched arms of a dying tree.  ​

Barbara Daniels
​
Barbara Daniels’ book Rose Fever was published by WordTech Press and her chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and many other journals. She received three Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.