Notes on “The Fishermen”

Sometimes you tire of those who have seen it all. Old salts and grizzled carpenters would gather in front of the store counter to badmouth people, but when someone walked in, they went silent. I would nod, they wouldn’t. They knew the big houses people were building, “must be a bitch to heat.” They had seen people come here before and think that they could set the world on fire. I just took my change and went along. But when the owner of the town sand & gravel pit appropriated approximately 25 tons of fieldstone belonging to me, to build his guest house, I went to the police chief of the town and reported what had happened. After a pause, he said, “You know, John, he’s always been greedy.” It seemed so succinct, almost ancient justice. Then I felt we needed more dictums to follow. We needed more proverb looking precepts to live by. I decided not to research them, but to just concoct new principles that would sound as though they had been written in the time of Anne Bradstreet, with yokes and stocks, with meeting houses and carts, with sugar spelled as shuger and wheat as wheate, to outdoor prisons and broken wooden wheels, so I began the poem, The Fishermen.