Your Catfish Friend

(Quilt by Lorena Pettway, Gee’s Bend, Alabama)

“When we think of friends,” wrote Mark Twain in a letter, “and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why, save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy — that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.”

YOUR CATFISH FRIEND

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

~ Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), American poet and writer