Your Game Is Asking Such Questions

Why are they trying to catch fish,
These tourists in white elephants
Shaped like bricks the size of houses,

Up here at cold reservoir
With packaged food in their pantries
And generators chilling ice—

What do they need with a few trout
Stocked fat and slickery as snot
Caught among the weeds and crawdads?

It’s got to be the game, that’s what.
There’s no nutritional reason,
And they’re not those roadside children

Who appeared in rainy season
Hawking strung fish for a living.
Give people something to enact

That may have once been serious
And now is just the ritual,
Then ask yourself, What are people?