Not too long ago I guided a great group of men for about a week and at one point, after a few cocktails, one of them started discussing his thoughts on the blind albino trout hidden well below the surface of the Big Lost River. This wonderful fiction stayed in the mind of Michael Hoover and he converted his thoughts to a poem he wrote a few days later:

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​Fly Fishing The Lost River For The Blind Albino Trout

On Midsummer's night under a moonless, starless sky

Go to the place of the Lost River's rise,​

And there, to the 10x leader on your one weight line

Tie a tippet, a thirty inch strand of the fine

Blond hair of the girl who broke your heart in 1965.​

Tie on a fly, one 28 black no-see-um, of course.​

Dress it only with the desiccant of your age.​

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Make a perfect cast to the rocky ledge

The edge between death and resurrection,​

And let that spirit float weightlessly down on the tiny eddy

Where loss meets redemption.​

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Mend the line.​

Close your eyes.​

Be the fly.​

​--Michael Hoover

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