June 9: Sweet Smelling and Good Tasting, Traumatic Brain Injury, "The Wonder Boys"

Santiago baits his hook . . . 

Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling and good tasting.

What do you hope to catch when you drop a baited hook in the water?  Something big.  A fish.  A friend.  A lover.  A poem.

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Today, I worked on lots of things.  The library events calendar.  A podcast episode.  A program about traumatic brain injury.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to go fishing for anything, no matter how much I wanted to.  Then, after all of that, I introduced my son to the movie Juno.  He loved it.  Cried at the end.  Now, I'm watching The Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas.  One of my favorite films about writers.

And I'm a little spent and thinking of a couple friends of mine who are dealing with some major issues in their lives.  Things that make people fall on their knees.  Or lose their faith.  Or write poetry.

Saint Marty chooses poetry tonight.  

Rain, Rain, and More Rain

by:  Martin Achatz

I read an almost sonnet about rain, rain, and more rain, hear

metallic fingers of rain on the air conditioner, a sound

that has been present since this afternoon when thunder

volleyed its approach, followed by wet bullets battering

the windows.  Now, it's softer, more purposed, like someone

composing a poem on an old Underwood, the way Frost

or Roethke did, their fingers keeping time with their thoughts,

and I think of a text I received from a friend a while ago:

I am struggling, in need of glimmer--and I texted her back

about the rain, how it wondered the ground, the maples,

how I knew/she knew that eventually rain ended, clouds

shredded, and blue would appear, blue and more blue, 

because, I told my friend, blue is as endless as the finger 

of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.