4th of July Fireworks. . .
How the Fireworks Started
(NYC 07 04 2019)
(* Excerpt from Small Fry: The Lure of the Little by ron P. swegman. 2009. The Whitefish Press.)
Fireworks!
Happy Fourth of July.
— rPs 07 04 2019
Posts Tagged New York
Tie Up Loose Ends
Tie Up Loose Ends . . .
Partridge & Orange, Deer & Orange
(NYC 03 2019)
Trout season in New York state opens April 1st. Time to tie up loose ends and whip finish those kebari fly patterns . . .
By Ebisu
Patterns go
In a stream’s flow.
Fishers,
Men and women,
Tie together
As feathers and fur do
When wrapped
By thread and floss;
Their names, embossed,
Become floating sculptures.
Optional Author’s Note: Ebisu is the Japanese god of fisherman, good luck, and workingmen, as well as the guardian of small children’s health. He is one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, and the only one of the seven to originate in Japan. This poem, about the legacy of fly tiers and their namesake creations, was composed while sitting by an image of Ebisu, thus the title.
— rPs 03 26 2019
The Brown Belt
The Brown Belt
November: Stream Banks Bare But For Nuts
The brown belt of tenkara fly fishing seen in the riparian gone to seed, felt in the waders in the cold, in the damp, in the brief days of November. To earn it is to do it. The reward, layered as most good things are, is that the fish, though scattered, sporadic, remain strong, with a few willing to strike a kebari worked perhaps at a slower pace than in spring or summer.
November Fallfish
The sound of the moving water holds tight to a higher presence on a stream lined by trees bare but for nuts and a few aged leaves faded like worn pennants.
Swans, Lake
(NYC 11 2018)
The pond as well has weathered the autumnal transition, and with the leaf hatch over, the fallen herded into a few corner spots, open waters rippled by wind look dark chocolate. Tannin depth nurtured by the afternoon switch from light to night, brief, almost beyond belief.
Largemouth Bass
(NYC 11 2018)
The reward, to repeat, the reward is that the fish, though scattered, sporadic, remain strong, with a few willing to strike a kebari worked perhaps at a slower pace than in spring or summer.
— rPs 11 30 2018
Season of the Steelhead
Season of the Steelhead . . .
NY Steellhead Stream. Lake Erie in the Distance
(NY 10 30 2018)
Halloween arrives with the turning of the leaves in a clouded mist, or a blue sky spread above pumpkin orange sugar maple leaves. Conditions ideal for autumn steel on the fly.
Patterns may include:
Green Guarantee
Salmon Black
Nuke Egg
— rps 10 31 2018
The White Fly
The White Fly . . .
The White Fly
(imitates the mayfly, genus Ephoron)
The poet, the poetic, part of me has always enjoyed finding a word with my name within it, and being born in August, all things keen to the eighth month of the calendar year attract me.
The insect known as the White Fly to fly fishers, the mayfly of the genus Ephoron, a prime hatch of August, is then right there on my short summer favorites list.
White Fly kebari for tenkara can be tied in a most simple manner. My recipe:
Hook: size 10-16, dry fly
Body: 6/0 thread, white
Hackle: Deer belly hair, white
The body is sparse, light, and deer belly hair adds bouyancy. Fish the fly on an August evening and catch brown trout, or smallmouth bass, or panfish, even channel catfish will rise to this fly on select clear and cobbled rivers in the American northeast.
The remainder of the time I stay true to the crayfish, and other creatures of the subaqueous realm, with some variant of my Green Guarantee.
The Green Guarantee
(NYC 08 2018)
— rPs 08 29 2018
Postscript: poetic disclosure; my first stand-alone collection – museum of buildings: poems – was first published twenty (20!) years ago this month . . .
museum of buildings: poems
(first edition, August 1998)
Lefty’s Rod
Lefty’s Rod . . .
The TFO BVK: acquired in memoriam of Bernard Victor Kreh
(NYC 04 2018)
April is National Poetry Month.
* Poetry CORNER *
April at the Bluejays
Mist belts all of the towers
At the waist,
Zipped locked lid not of lead, but of white,
Enlightened.
Wind winded rests, sets in sky unscraped stillness,
All is could,
Not even the scat siren extremes sing, no,
Jazzbulance,
Do within such mists near trees are hung lamps,
Enlightened,
More or less to describe the vibe, window open,
Spring blessed,
The rest no rest beyond brief evenings in nest,
Relaxed crest;
We let the robins sing all the evening,
We give the morning to all of the doves.
* Poetry CORNER *
Along the Flow
(04 2018)
Along the flow,
With Lefty’s rod,
And by Ebisu.
Tenkara is, too,
Verses not vs. ,
Knew and new.
— rPs 04 27 2018
Fly, Eagles Fly
Fly, Eagles Fly . . .
(Philadelphia on the) Fly, Eagles Fly
(02 2018)
Yes, the Philadelphia Eagles have won Superbowl LII.
The tenkara angler, artist, and author of Philadelphia on the Fly could not resist the photo op.
🦅
— rPs 02 05 2018
The Aliving I Do
The Aliving I Do . . .
Hook to Hand: In Memoriam. (NYC 01 2018)
Winter, short days of natural light, on one a free hour to daydream over flies tied and once and for one tethered to a memorable fish brought to hand.
Retired, rowed under the white January light, the patterns, kebari alined in the Flybrary convey a line of gravestones, hand-to battles with individual fish, now in memory, ending well.
Two books in print gives one imagery of grace enough to give away, for a time, useful insight.
Writing, the noun, one encounters antecedents where Albert Camus traces the artist at work, or an artist, Gertrude Stein, who to the end collaged grammar and vocabulary into grand reads.
My first book in hand, dimensions of a collection of poetry. Oh, I forgot to mention in the preface:
“Start steady and seek the click rhythm worked into the prose and the cadence will carry you, ceate one of those satisfying read-in-one-extended-sitting kind of poetic books that Poe, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kawabata, Camus, and Hesse have delivered.”
My book, at last, delivered and signed for at the cornershop on a July afternoon, picked up by me and back out on the sidewalk I raised copy #1 above the view of the leafy neighboorhood treeline in light sunny yellow and warm: I saw, I witnessed the punctuation mark to a project. I had completed some thing, words separated on purpose, as the thing itself seemed huge, philosophical, existential.
Book in hand, solid rectangle of heavy paper, cultivated, communicated a similar slab: the gravestone.
Yes, books, books you yourself author, are gravestones. Here lies, truths, of an atc lived within the intervals of your creative life.
Insight.
Yes, it is in the living, at times fishing, and in others kindred, in the documenting of the living in writing and at times select image, rendered, that drives the alive, the aliving I do.
Gertrude Stein, born in West Allegheny, PA, resided in Paris for a majority of her creative life; she wrote a lot.
(NYC 01 2018)
A New Year. 2018
— rPs 01 30 2018
New York’s West Coast
New York’s West Coast . . .
Lake Erie
(11 2017)
My one fly kebari for the local freshwater, The Green Guarantee, required a second thought for a November trip to the tributaries along New York’s far west coast.
The fish from Lake Erie, migratorial steelhead, salmonid with shoulders and a girth exceeding a foot of inches, settled me on size 8 streamer and salmon hooks. The results, tied, packed, fished, finished positive.
Lake Erie Chrome
(11 2017)
(photo credit: Stephen Kasperovich)
Green Guarantee, meet . . .
The Ho Holiday
The Ho Holiday
(NYC 11 15 2017)
The Ho Holiday
Fly tied, alliteration activated, for a kebari salmon steelhead fly named to honor a variety of levels of meaning. Honor for the mighty steelhead river Ho on the Olympic Peninsula. The holiday red added for the steelhead’s predilection for hot color when streambound. Tinsel added for the traditional barber pole spiral dressing, the necktie of the fly.
Steelhead take such a fly in places autumnal beautiful in a way always graceful followed by a force up, down, side to side, in and out of water, sprints that push water, jumps that land on the water with a bass plunge that resonates sheer weight. Magnificent animals, each and every steelhead represents itself.
Quick Grip Before Release
(11 2017)
Respect.
— rPs 11 15 2017
50, Fish Day: Part II
50, Fish Day: Part II . . .
Bridge at 50
(USA 08 2017)
Fifty (50!) found me along a freestone stream. Water flowed, shared with kingfisher and heron, the frog, and a few scattered sulphers in the air.
The forage I chose to imitate through the day was the crayfish. A generic pale mayfly caddis passed the evening.
Before me, evening dawned, at the bridge, covered, once the grand entrance to a mill good for grit. This day, for me, the line of start and finish, explore and fish, the “Where?” spot in my own story met another’s, the baton this time released to a great blue heron, which spread wings, turned, flapped upstream with the carriage of a citzen.
Turned, bridge behind, current carried me from the back. Water clear and cool enough for trout. Scattered rain, drops vertical, under dynamic gray sky, some blue in passing patches.
What here encountered the tenkara scuttle of Green Guarantee and Deer and Herl kebari produced a double digit count of smallmouth bass, sandy or barred, and fallfish, bright as a tarpon, sipping both emerging and emerged.
Smallmouth: Barred
(08 2017)
Smallmouth: Sandy
(08 2017)
Sunset plus one, the hike in hardy wading pants under sky of brick red and blue, my pocket light lit the green marsh path, towing net, vested, kebari art, and tenkara baton down through a dark chapel of trees. The incandescent blue lane above my head lured my eyes up, out, there I glimped a meteor of The Perseids, and smiled.
Bright as a Tarpon:
Fallfish
(08 2017)
— rPs 08 23 2017
Tenkara Takes Manhattan 