"The bird is a great help," the old man said. Just then the stern line came taut under his foot, where he had kept a loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt the weight of the small tuna's shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to haul it in. The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue back of the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and bullet shaped, his big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat, fast-moving tail. The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still shuddering, under the shade of the stern.
"Albacore," he said aloud. "He'll make a beautiful bait. He'll weigh ten pounds."
Hemingway knows how to say a lot in a few words. His description of Santiago landing this tuna is simple and brutal, but it has lyric touches, especially with the line "his big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat . . ." Every writer should wish to put together sentences like this.
Today, I spent the afternoon writing poems with one of my best poet friends. It was part of Art Week in Marquette, Michigan. My friend and I sat at a table and challenged passersby to stop and give us topics. If we didn't deliver a poem within ten minutes, the passersby got to throw a water balloon at us. It was called "Douse the Poet."
Spoiler alert: we stayed dry all afternoon.
It was a warm day, and, in the space of two hours, my friend and I wrote a combined total of 20 poems. Not too shabby. I've always loved the exercise of freewriting, and to spend an entire afternoon getting paid to freewrite, well, it doesn't get much better.
Saint Marty may not be Hemingway, but, by God, he can crank out poetry when under the gun.
A poem from this afternoon:
Phil in the Park
by: Martin Achatz
He sits here, rain or sun, tornado or blizzard,
his tie always straight, his sweater buttoned as neatly
as a well-tended garden, carrots and peas, marigolds and zinnias
in beautiful straight rows. And he smiles, always smiles,
another constant in a world of honking horns, rushing cars.
Why can't the world have more Phils, going from building to building,
bucket and squeegee in hand, wishing only to clean
what is dirty, wash away the scales from our eyes
so that we can see everything that is beautiful?
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