Portrait of Perfection

There are those found inspired by nightfall’s surge of darkness that suddenly swallows all failing shades and shadows of daylight.  The rock-hoppers.  The fence climbers.  The skishing wet-suiters.  The wader-clad.  All those who motion and daydream throughout light of day, but live to mobilize during this magic hour of metamorphosis.  This reactive catalyst they know as sunset.  That spilling span of time when the covert cadres grow stirred by incitement for the holding sea’s most coveted fortune dressed of fins.  For Sax, the preeminent inshore piscatorial portrait of perfection, whose very migratory manifestations brave as the swimming envy of their every neglected exchange of nocturnal retrieve and prelude of sudden, striking anticipation. 

The rod-wielding advantaged arrive all points framed of seawater to disappear from sight, save a headlamp’s faraway blink of light unmasking perfect strangers standing with the night.  Fellow-fishers honoring homage at the forefront of their chosen sandy alters.  Their sanctuaries of giving generosity that with flooding tides, are blanketed by the cover of lapping waters inundating the fringes of surf-carved slopes.  There, entrenched amongst the rhythmic chorus of gravel and stones churning and sands seething, they wait for just one brief encounter when the Atlantic’s divine-denizen may be momentarily revealed from such underwater expanses of her briny extremities to lay deathly still upon the terra firma fraction of a foreign world pierced of starlight and Orion overseeing all high above.  They imagine the scaly sight of her gleaming green glamor to again fall reflected upon the gaze of their hungered, hunting eyes.  These envisions all the same that thousands upon thousands exert so many countless hours of in-pursuit, only for those so few glorious seconds borne as hovering witness.  Sax, their shining trophy.  A mount suitable for the mantle of memory.

So each does what he knows best.  He casts.  He casts, again.  And yet, again.  He casts such that triumph may again saturate his eyes in scaly accents of oceanic-going lavender atop those thick shoulders shimmering of a glittering gold.  He wets line for those seven black, laterally-running stripes segmenting a broad viridescent body’s gradient of moss-green washing away to white.  He wades closer towards a haunting memory luring to ensure that only the most crazed and afflicted remain awake for through all hours and minutes of an autumn or winter night.  Wading and waiting for that one, preferred incident of tidal rendezvous.  He accepts, as an adamant angler in a state of sleep-deprived stupor, that he may languish in withering-away, suddenly seeing double-vision of the graphite accomplice held before him, knowing full-well there exists no chance of hooking a double-header, but casts again, to only try.  He reties, for the glory of reliving a moment that was lived yesteryear.  For the next cast made that will fall closer in closing sigma’s statistically-probable, enuring curve of time, before enduring the next startling tug.  He switches colors, for the hope of seeing the inconceivable.  For the surprise and thrill of surfacing a new personal-best.  He readies himself for the shaking-satisfaction of lying her wet, long broad body onto sand, while making visual contact of her golden-colored iris rotating towards his own, as a skinny rush of bubbling water passes around her alabaster-colored belly, only to stall upon the beach slope and then retreat to sea.  To photograph the Atlantic’s prized daughter, pulled aground upon dark and hard-packed, smoothened sand.

It’s the picture of such a moment thus captured in his mind, raised of his hands and hoisted ashore by hook, which keeps him reeling in the night.  The torpedo-shaped portrait, embodied of time and tide, slice of moon and ceiling of cloud, buffet of bait and blow of wind, water of chilling and luck of locating, is ultimately, where this collision of sea will have confessed her best-held secrets unto sand.  As Sax.  As a sculptured snap-shot freeze-framed in his mind forever.  As a streamlined benefit tail-slapping the glass-smooth, saturated sands of a beach.  All, for pursuit of recreation.  All, in the name of chasing picture-perfect dreams worthy of re-creation.