This tree saw stars in the sea.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; boating, 35km]
Day: July 11, 2021
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+22)
We went fishing today.
Arthur made more effort vis-a-vis communication than I’ve seen in awhile. Specifically, he told me yesterday, well ahead of time, that he wanted to go out fishing today.
This means a lot to me – it makes it possible for me to prepare myself mentally, to make sure I’m not in the middle of something stressful with my ongoing computer work (which is, frankly, traumatizing me lately). In fact, knowing we would go out today, I woke up extra early, did something relaxing instead of messing with the programming stuff, and even meditated for a while – something I should do more of.
So when we left at 7, I was more prepared than usual for dealing with Arthur’s laconic eccentricities. I made a lot of effort to be positive, and in fact, that helped. I’ve never wanted to deny that at least some of the issues and tension that arise between us on the boat is a result of my own shortcomings.
The water was flat and still when we left.
By the time we exited Port Saint Nicholas, however, the wind had leaped into action and the water was quite choppy. We went to San Ignacio, again, and trolled up and down the east side, twice. Nothing.
We then went to Point Tranquil. There, we hooked a salmon who got away, but shortly after, hooked another. It seems that it was the same salmon, because the second salmon had a hook in it, which we’d lost in the first (though Arthur hadn’t realized it at the time).
There were no more salmon. But there were many boats. I suspect there were more boats than fish. It was Sunday, after all – many recreational boaters out, a hefty-looking research vessel of some kind, a boat with a flag indicating divers were beneath, a commercial fishing boat anchored and a family on the shore nearby. And lots of sportfishing craft.
We trolled along the north side of that arm of Prince of Wales Island to Caldera Bay, where we gave up on catching salmon – though they were leaping out of the water all around us. We fished for halibut for a while. Nothing there, either. Then we came home. Here’s the northwest corner of Caldera Bay, a spot called Point Lomas (you can click the pic to embiggen).
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 3
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 1
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 11
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Poem #1806 “On Forgetting Having Seen the Cornice of a House”
ㅁ On Forgetting Having Seen the Cornice of a House The group of people I find myself with That night as per the howling fugitives Dana, Kray, yourself, others — perhaps dan, In vaguely snow-strewn streets dwelling The Darkness somehow uninterested in the commitment Which is inevitably involved in introspection We did walk and laugh as per the adjourned party of this dream, perhaps hoping, or at least hopeful. Inevitable, perhaps again, that Kray & Dan should take the stage, a wall along the sidewalk bearing the hasty, sublime imprint of white which has its origins in this Minnesota winter. That stage I forget. But, when if moved to a framed window at the brown forgotten cornice of a house, A framed action which jumped through the window tho' the picture was indeed still — The actress my young mother, whom I've never known, Tilted in misery, — Who appeared (after Kray's antics as the carefree dog on an elevator — which that boxed cornice became through some trick of photography which I once knew in some philosophic context, but which given the retrospect of those pews I now forget. More on the pews later. Kray swallowed the spittle in his throat and danced, blinking wildly in the droplets which escaped his mouth to dance the blowing gusts of The open window on this cornice accelerating so rapidly downward.) in that aquamarine fluorescence of the bottom of the ocean seen in a black and white film which must be seething with imagination or at least the unwarranted indication of things outside the realm of a black and white reality. It was fine green workshop lighting, as If Jacques Cousteau had wandered in to film this depth, the nascent, Yes, oedipally so, nascent sun filtering downward with those discouraged probability functions which Max Planck may or may not have understood, but which the fish understand without asking — perhaps that is their key. A fine gold key it must be they possess, an ancient one as they swim within the metaphor which My motionless child-mother evokes as she bends foetally upon herself, framed like the light, within the cornice of that house above the wall upon the street, wreathed with the heavy winter taste of night. The funeral, the man who entered talking loudly as if he himself were the dead, the discussion of his purpose on the gravel outside the whiteness Of those pews, with mooning. The arrival at your house, the… the decoration, the food. Your athletics. Your "father." the ensuing days. The shoes, The car trip. The black place, the nukes, & John. The terminal, taxes. writing. sleep.
– a free-form poem from my distant past. I wrote this in the late fall of 1983. It was the record of a dream, written in paper form, but then later I transcribed the poem to my blog in 2014 (though I posted the poem under an estimated date of composition, as I tend to do). I’m re-publishing it here in my daily poems for the sake of completeness, I guess. You can tell I’d been reading Ginsberg and Borges.