Who wrote this poem?

[czubek]

I spent afternoons like an old man's drowsy years,
fishing the creek water, as frothed and gold as lager,
catching river cats beyond the ironwood spears.
But with every catch, I hoped there was another, bigger.

And began to think there was a king of catfish there,
inert as a sack of coins in the bottom mud, wise
as he meditated in his dream-dark lair,
from a tarbucket head and two pale green eyes.

From a study of the specimens expiring on the bank,
I formed a picture of the mammoth one: grumpy, old,
heavy as a tub of cheese, uncleansed by water, rank.
He oared himself erect inside my mind and glowed.

His skin was twisted like a woman's hose upon his sides,
his mouth was tasseled like a lamp with ancient hooks;
now this embodied silence simply lasts beneath the tides
as remote from baits and lures as from the flight of ducks.

I've thought upon my monster beyond the range
of credulity; accepted him as if he really existed
and shook the abutments of my reason. Beyond change,
in a myth beyond begetting, this thing has lasted.

The real ones, I have found, are mortal in the mind
as in the world of hooks and worms and lethal boys.
The dreamed one lasts on where he's never been,
untroubled as a star by hooks and facts and other toys.

[lukebodell]

You?

[czubek]

I only wish. The Catfish was written by someone far more gifted than me.