Getting the Drift

a poem

I'm not planning to post on social media over the next few weeks, but I am scheduling a poem a week to go out to subscribers during this time. Fly-fishing has long been a love of mine. Please enjoy these poetic fishing reflections from a Montana river.

Getting the Drift

The river widens first,
bending through cottonwoods
already shedding their pale fluff,
catching in the slow water,
dark with silt, holding cold light,
the air smelling of pine pitch
and damp stone.

I step in slow.
The water is colder than it looks,
climbing my calves,
numbing them before I’m ready,
the cold rearranging
what I can feel.
Sun heats the back of my neck.
The current keeps its pace.

I feel for the bottom the way I always have—
testing, hesitating,
each rock translated
through boot and bone,
weight tipped forward,
as if one wrong step
would matter too much.

A stone rolls.
Another holds.

Downstream an osprey lifts from a snag,
circles once,
then lifts empty,
shaking water from its wings.
Grasshoppers tick in the dry grass
along the bank.
Nothing here is asking
for relentless precision—
the current keeps forgiving small mistakes.

I cast into the seam where fast water
slides alongside slow,
a thin line of bubbles
marking the divide.
The line lifts and settles in the guides.
I lift too soon,
trying to read what isn’t there.
The fly drags.
Then drags again.

I shorten the drift.
Grip the cork harder than I need to.
Stand braced where the current
presses my calves,
mistaking tension for steadiness.

Fingers clumsier than I expect,
my forearms ache,
before anything else does.

The correcting loosens.
Not all at once—
just long enough
to let the line finish its path.
My feet settle wider.
My breath finds its length.
The cold moves higher,
and I do not fight it.

The river carries what it carries—
needles, a leaf,
the shadow of wings—
without asking permission.
A log knocks once against the bank
and stays.
When I step back out,
water pours from the cuffs of my waders,
darkening the dust,
gravel shifting under my boots.
My hands smell of river and metal.
They are steadier now,
without scrutiny.

Behind me the current closes the space
where I had been standing.
The bend opens.
The river goes on.

I walk the bank a moment longer,
not checking myself,
and something I have been holding
for years
stays behind.

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My book, At Home with God: How the Cross Transforms Us, is coming out this fall from InterVarsity Press. Preorders help the book reach more readers, churches, and small groups. If you’d like to support the book and help it find its way into more hands, you can preorder here:https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-God-Cross-Transforms/dp/1514017008