Seconds will slip away, unraveling
from the favor of the present much like the curling, vaporous whisks of
condensed breath escaping from between his concave furrow of chapped lips, ephemeral
exhalations quickly vanishing from existence, diverted by the early morning’s
easy easterly blow to course elsewhere, to neutralize from the nineties and assimilate
with universality, to blend as the autonomous exchanges of purpose for that
continuous effort to define reason
(or is re-define or re-discover or defy or more so, illusory mirages of each?) amongst life vanishing
into the trailing slipstream of reality like the backwash of the wave his
planted feet are now shifting and sinking softly within, essentially escaping
from somewhere to elsewhere, physically, in time and sand-covered
space, seawater and spray, but more so mentally, behind the guise of
half-opened eyes and thoughts contained within a wrap of dry, wind-taut cold
skin, a kinetic energy returning seaward to where perceptions of all else have
originated and so return to remain forever kinetic as though that very
millisecond of thought he just thought, that swirling and sinuous inspiration
as mesmerizing in beauty and subliminal in self-rooted-recognition as dawn’s witnessed
creeping cast of color served to impress one mortal man’s immortalized
imagination, those affected brushstrokes upon the soul, spewed trailing and
twisting, spiraling and sweeping, bending and blending, as though the ossified
oils conjured and frozen for all time for all to see like van Gogh’s The Starry
Night have in his mind depicted a masterpiece of Nature’s impression-able, impossible to imagine
any more immaculately impactful in immortal image as Her impermanent Inspiration of a Splash of Time. This breath and blink of time, growing to
flower in grafted scions of seconds, born of a bearing impression, germinates
the soulful seed of this awestruck angler.
My rigid and austere accomplice
has endured once more, resisting submission to a countenance of everlasting
curvature. A line tension unyielding to
slackness. An eventuality yielding the
crushed-barb hook-set, now un-set, from her creasing cortege of cartilage as nothing
more than a sharpened, dangling placidity, static, awaiting aerial course and aqueous
trial by its regulated, fibrous staff of potential, but again, I arise from a
squatting observation of ease to stand upright within the shallow, seething
blanket of foamy water rushing back eastward over the smoothened and striated
runnels of carved, coarse sand and pebbles, racing towards the building curl of
an oncoming wave, one having been brave enough to charge free from these
mysterious depths of uncertainty, splashing wildly upward and turbulently
encircling my firmly-set footing with the forceful influence of a schoolyard
bully’s provoking shove, hissing below my bloated smile, inciting a sudden flash
of mental and environmental alertness as she asserts, yes, I feel you here, just as I have now made you aware of me. Her invitation to feel uncreated. Familiarized with
the unfamiliar. Her assertion to become less unreal, and more
real.
Another kind of alive. Six seconds after coming to terms with the
realization of what just was. What is now gone, returned to the unseen vastness of the sea. Of the hook-sinking fate that may await after
the next thrust of my finned-prize’s tail, one that may be her last exhibition
of glory before becoming the principal ingredient to the chemical involvement
of another being’s metabolism. As energy
forever flowing in motion. As energy
enveloped in a fatal transformation. As
matter, neither created nor destroyed, but altered from fusiform form. Nevertheless, not a matter of conservation,
for she will forever be gone. Her stripes stripped of form. Gone to become the building blocks of life in
another, adenosine triphosphate, but I
don’t need-a-seen the trip of its fillet-fate. I just know. It’s inevitable. The complications of the two coexisting. Her impulses to feed. Her hunger to strike. His
impulse of hunger to cast. Man, the
stalking, ever-present dealer of death, the imposter devising for her decided
destruction, poses to pitch and immerse his imitable, plastic offerings of wounded
prey. He is the otherwise
indistinguishable embodiment of impending doom lurking from above the fatal fringes
of her watery ceiling retrieving rolling rattles or baiting Bunker bodies or
trolling lured dredges or sieging sudden surrender with seins of scooping,
championing Saxatilicide, achieving esteemed
status as the slayer of Morone Saxatilis. For him to find harvested, oven-baked and
pan-seared succulence or gaudy showmanship of trophy, an egotistically-inspired
carnage and catharsis of conservancy by means of Pisciphilocide (or, love of
killing fish) committed in the dragging of drying caudal tails over sand
and pavement, the gripping hoist of gill plates, the closing of crammed
coolers, the evisceration of body cavities, the snapping of spines and the callous
carving of cartilaginous carcasses, upon which discarded, severed heads, whose glassy
and wide-open, wizen, golden-colored eyes are disjointed from tamed tails upon the
inky, open pages of section A’s five-day-old entrail-sodden editorials. Extra!
Extra! Read all about it! exclaim the words from her unseasoned obituary. Her purging extirpation from elegantly
existing as a principle ingredient to the memory and moment of Nature. I read this daily news. I know of the flesh-war waged upon her every seasonal
whereabout. The mounting struggle for equilibrium
until there is equilibrium no more. This
metamorphosis of momentum, unstoppable as the wind is to open palms and cupped
fingers held outright against an oncoming, onshore breeze. As unstoppable as tomorrow’s inevitable
sunrise, and as cheated in one’s anticipation of viewing such a fiery glow
bleed in color across the dawning sky when it is otherwise obfuscated and
obscured by drawn curtains of bloated, blackened clouds ominously stalled upon
the horizon instead. This evaporation of
what is now from the flowing stream
of time, the vaporizing pool of potential ever-increasingly disappearing in
what remains of this season’s fleeting continuum of fortuity and of limited
time and tail and tide. Gone, yes, but
never entirely purged from the
churning metabolism of my own memory.
It is said that Nature abhors a
vacuum. She suffers a fear of emptiness. And should not Her most capable and intelligent
descendants fear an empty sea? Or do his
repeated acts alone speak for themselves, selfish, and without depth of
conscience? As one pair of eyes see, it
is the ship of mankind whose piercing bow carelessly slices over the charity of
Her back, disrupting the fragile reflections of harmony cast upon Her surface, rearing
ripples of ruinous repercussion, while setting a stormy sea of uncertainty in
his wake. Entropy may be of Her own
creation and accord, but in the perfectly-arranged composition that is Her unsurmountable,
unsurpassable magnum opus sprouting
the symphonious sounds of the living, Her swimming swarms of fellow brothers
and sisters will never be left willingly in abandon, blinded by a blankness of
white nothingness, for there shall always exist, for all conceivable eternity, the
fertile touches of their dearest Mother, in all colors curing. There is always the recurring promise, the heal
of Her hope, of mature masses migrating, scores of schoolies schooling, the annual
lengthening of lateral lines layered on the brooding classes of bruising
brawlers, the growing rewards of Her perpetuating fecundity. Of a saltwater-brined future yet unwritten, a
telling tide yet unrisen. Of a wet-sand-slapping,
truncate-tail yet to radiate as this
fisherman’s sweeping tale, somewhere and sometime before a sunrise yet
unborn. A day yet to awaken one man’s dreams
in stretching hues reddened and breathing to mirror the pulse of life in her
image.
So
I plead, dear son, that you
be sure to always look further,
broadening the shores of your mind, but
also do your best to eye nearer, ever closer, to wash over this world of
mine with that drifting gaze of your calculated curiosity, just as my surging
tide too rushes over the migrant presence of your found-feet towards higher
ground, prying, as if to feel with my fluid touch just who this is before me,
where we both happen to explore this mutual acceptance of what is, here, now,
during this thin sliver of time we share, fostered within this shower of the
breathing tide, for my forthcoming light-of-life unhurriedly emerging before
your staring eyes is something greater than that which may ever be attributed
with a certain physical existence, one as simply instinctually-driven and
corporal as your own. Remember, dear child,
that above all else, what you are is the sum of who I already am and have
always been, she hints from a pouring of abounding breath.
The
eternity of my voice will always be. I
will always be here, timeless, roaring, waiting. Inescapable to your soul and unavoidable to
your sight. My thundering heartbeat, ubiquitously
alluring, will never ebb further than the harbor of your own mind, as haunting
as the murmuring resonance heard from the spiraling depths of a knobbed welch
held close to your ear. So I will
whisper this more, for I know you regard the unfailing sounds of reflection I
shell-out. Know that what I am is greater
than that which you seek the striped-body of, the familiar, dignified odorous
residue of what you may praise as an exalted morning from the suds of my surf,
of fish-slime glazed upon your dampened palms, of wet and sticky sand granules
adhered to the inside lengths of your chilled, pruning fingers, or the flaky,
translucent proof of small, cycloid-shaped scales donated upon the connected angler’s
sleeve, your own, those noticed only after his benevolent revival of my
otherwise finned-sacrifice writhes and wiggles wildly to vanish from sight
under a concealing cloak of foam, the pride of this angler’s collagenous
souvenir, his bonus brooch, may it serve as mindful evidence of the fragile living
pulse pumping and surging forward, enduring everywhere, gliding with the every
tidal motion in which I rise and fall, beating and coursing within this salty
soma of mine, the very element you now see swelling to life with each repeated
cast by the growing flame of an effervescent effusion coaxing chromatic change. So I am…
And so the penetrating renewal
of morning solicits for his sight, outpouring in prominence to pass into the
permanence of his mind’s eye. Elevated
in stance and renewed in esteem, he stirs from a drifting daze to cast aside
these perturbing perceptions of a piscatorial pessimism. Behold!
For the shining stripes of her glistening contour reflect the glow of a growing
orange orb of optimism, one rising from the reaches of darkness to slather both
with the conspiring seconds of time for which they are held frozen. Both, awash in a light and life, ascending. He invites the lineaments of her image to
rest alight in the longevity that is a reeling remembrance mounted upon the
wall of his mind, alongside her many kin who have all come before. Who must all come before, after all have been
left to go, released in form to stream within her tides of favor. Those torrents of time which have all favored
him so generously. The whip of a cast
revives a pause from the present, and so, his perpetuity of purpose. The surf, smashes at his feet.
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