Complexities

(Today's prompt from Writer's Digest is to write a complex poem, with a variety of options given for the meaning complex. The fate of a fisherman I alluded to a few poems ago seems to speak of complexities we face in the daily choices we make.)

It seems that it should be quite simple.
Downstate waters are full of fish
that upstate people crave.
Farmers markets are bursting with
local produce,
and no one sells fish.

Customers clamor:
We need fish.
Where can you get fish
fresh and local
without being an angler yourself.

I, for one, was ecstatic
when the fisherman arrived in Saratoga.
Having moved from Seattle,
fish fresh and local was a big part
of my daily diet.
I hadn't realized how big
until the only fish I could find
came from the market,
the supermarket,
origins unknown.

Lines were long for the downstate fisherman
and didn't diminish
after the novelty ended.
For weeks, we feasted on
clams, oysters, and mussels,
ling cod, haddock, flounder,
and scrod.
Porgy, tuna, monkfish,
and swordfish once in awhile.

But fresh and local has rules
that fish from downstate waters
are going to have to break.
Long Island fish isn't caught
within fifty miles of
Saratoga.

There was an understanding
and an exemption granted.
But few understood that while
all of the fish were caught in
Long Island area waters,
not all were caught
by the fisherman in question.
Where did they come from?
His sources, he said.
Trustworthy.

Questions built,
jealousies over his success perhaps grew.
Like crabs pulling the one
that climbs out of the bucket back down,
others decided his word
was not good enough.

Trustworthy.
What does it mean?
I ask it, too.
People are honest,
people are nice.
I'd like to take them for their word.
But sources which are not yours
belong to whom?
Wal-mart? A commercial catcher?
How do we know what's true?

Monsanto pollutes our food,
and even organic corn by now
might not be organic
as organic was understood
in the days before GMO.

And money.
Organic and fresh and local
are not volume items.
They cost more
as pocketbooks slim down.

Complexities caught the fisherman
in a net not of his making.
Will they snare us, as well,
if we just trust, if we don't ask?