Clubine’s careful poetry avoids the easy delineation of beginning, middle, end. Rather, cycles of birth and death overlap. As the narrator says goodbye to her father, the trout are laying eggs. There is no neat separation between earth and sky, father and daughter, object and water. Stories hang on hooks, stars land in riverbeds. A father dies like a fish retreating: “you have already slipped beneath the surface.” Everything in nature has its own volition. Lessons carry between generations, like a fly that knows it must rise before it falls. As Clubine’s descriptions and phrases repeat, language itself takes on the cycle.