Analysis of "The Fisherman" by Frank Ormsby

This feels like reading two short poems back to back since the style, narrative, and perspective changes from third to first.  There's something about this poem that forces a connection, and I think that's what this poem attempts to do, I imagine.

So the first sentence of the first stanza situates the reader. "The cowled fisherman / balances up to his waist /at the center of the Waterworks lake.

Logistically speaking, I didn't think about waterworks lake, but rather this pastoral image of a fisherman just going out there doing what he does.  "How bold was he, how tentative / he stepped from the shore / and made the world his circle."  he second sentence feels like a set-up for a strong metaphor about life and letting the world in in a new change of scenery.  But this poem doesn't end here, "Now he may cast / extravagantly in every direction."  Situated and searching in a bold new area.

If the first stanza was alone, I'd think it'd be out of a positive affirmation poem.  Nothing wrong with those, but what draws me in?

It's how the next line, even though it shifts perspective, merges the idea of both the "I" speaker and the "he" with, "Taking my retirement for a walk,"  Don't we assume at this point that the "I" and "he" seem like the same person who gains an epiphanic moment in the water?  But the "I" speaker is just observing, "I stay to watch him make the first catch / He raises it to his lips and kisses it."  The "he" jumped in to the lake, cast in several directions, and finally caught something in this symbol right, right?

"pout to pout, I imagine,"

Stop.

So much depends on how you read, "I imagine"

After reading this point, I felt something was off about the poem.  The poem points out about the "I" imagination and we go back to the first stanza.  

How much the first stanza is a fabrication set in reality.  Is it what the "I" speaker relates to?  Or is this an imagined idyllic scene.

This type of shift in tone, although slight, gives me something off.  I think the real metaphor is pointed out, "then bends, / custodian of second chances, / to release it, to give it back to itself." Redemption after getting caught, brought in, and kissed on the lips.  Just to be let go.  Let go.  

This is a poem you go back after reading "I imagine."  How the meaning of the poems has layers by separating out what to think, what to want, and what is actually redeemed.