A LOT OF things can happen in a week. Sometimes it's overwhelming, like life itself. Last week I went to Chico. My old pal Sherrie, from Pittsburgh, was reading from her new book, I Call This Flirting. It was a university thing, with professors and tweed and grad students, and so afterwards everyone went out drinking. Except I went back to our motel room and cried myself to sleep.

Next morning Sherrie's husband Rick took me fishing. He's an experienced fly-fisher, and I'm a different sort of fisher. I don't know angling from Adam. Earlier this summer, in Colorado, I made a hobby out of waking up ridiculously early and bicycling to the river, where I would sit on the shore and hold a pen very still in front of my face, staring over the tip of it into the rushing water until suddenly, out of nowhere, the tip of the pen would start to bob and dance. I had caught a poem.

I pulled a lot of poems out of the Eagle River earlier this summer, and last Saturday morning at the Feather I caught three. One was a keeper. The other two were so small, hideous, ugly, absurd, and/or malformed that I had to throw them back.

Do you want to hear the one I kept? It's called "Fishing for Flies" because I actually got this one out of a small pond a ways away from the river where I had gone to get away from mosquitoes and eat wild grapes ...

A stick like a stake

through the heart

of this pond, still

as rape under bright

green flannel sheets.

Bird perched on the point

of that scum-hung stick

can help me tell what time

it is but knows, itself, only

what time is: flies, flying.

I don't know, maybe I should have thrown that one back too. But I'm learning. How to write fish poems. Rick came back with a couple of fish stories but no fish. That night we cooked vegetables over our campfire and drank wine and shot shit. And then the next night we were back in the city and so so hungry.

Sherrie was reading at the Hemlock Tavern, so I thought we'd eat Ethiopian food beforehand at Axum East up the street. She used to love the one on Haight Street. Well, the one on Polk isn't open on Sundays, but we found an Indian-Pakistani place up the river, across the pond from Shalimar.

Darbar. They've got nice little old-country pastoral paintings along one wall, and a shelf along the other full of lamps and urns and coffeepots and all kinds of antique ornateness. Indian, or Pakistani music. And the young waiterguyperson was almost excessively polite, excusing himself for every little thing he did, as if giving you a glass of water or taking your menu were rough equivalents to an elbow in the ear. "Excuse me. Excuse me."

Dude, no sweat.

We ordered some things. It was me, Rick, Sherrie, and Lee. I know I got something called nihari, which was enticingly described as "seasoned beef leg bones cooked overnight" ($5.99). Now when something is cooked overnight, I just sort of automatically want in on it. Why? What's so appetizing about "cooked overnight"? I picture basements, for some reason – an underground kitchen with simmering cauldrons of secret stuff. Nighttime stuff, the stuff that dreams are made of, like leg bones.

Oddly, there were no bones to my meal. It was three lumps of beef in a hot and heavy curry sauce. The meat was tender and delicious, sure, but ... A lot of sauce, which came in handy for the rice and naan, but three little pieces of meat isn't going to cut it for me, not even now that I'm eating healthily.

Speaking of which, the vegetarian samosas with potatoes and peas ($1.99) were very good. The naan was good. There was garlic naan too, on the table, but I didn't like that as much. But really anything at all dipped into that deep, dark, spicy curry sauce was going to be a treat.

Lee ordered some kind of fish dish which came in a similar sauce. It wasn't cooked overnight or nothing, but it was pretty good too. And there was more of it. I also sampled some of Sherrie's palak paneer ($4.99). That's the spinach and cheese dish I always try and never really love. Then Rick had some kind of tandoori fish ($9.99), but I didn't taste it, for some reason. It was "the one that got away."

Darbar. 1412 Polk (at California), S.F. (415) 359-1236. Daily, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible.

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Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).