Nurse

Posted by Dave Bonta on January 16, 2007 (last modified at 12:22 pm, 1/16/07)

From my pocket notebook. One morning last week.

I dream of snakes swimming through the air, flinging themselves at me like starving kittens, clinging to my chest & biting my male nipples with fangs too weak to pierce the skin. I wake to fine flakes, widely spaced, sinking like diatoms to the murky bottom of the sky. Three squirrels are following a fourth through the trees at the woods’ edge, a slow-motion chase up & down trunks & across swaying nets of black birch twigs. Female gray squirrels come into heat for eight hours every January. The chase is not to the swift, but to the persistent. Whenever she stops, the closest male inches forward with his snout low against the branch, trembling. I sit watching with my coffee, glad not to be a squirrel. I’m wearing a brand-new turtleneck shirt — black like all the others — & twist & twitch in its unfamilar embrace. The ground slowly acquires a nurse’s uniform.

Filed in Nature/Ecology, Poems & poem-like things. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.Print Print

4 Responses to Nurse

  1. beth says:
    January 17, 2007 at 10:46 am

    All really good, but the diatoms will stay floating in my consciousness every time I see those big slow flakes.

    Reply
  2. Fred Garber says:
    January 17, 2007 at 11:55 am

    ” The chase is not to the swift, but to the persistent.”

    Reply
  3. mb says:
    January 18, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    I have been enjoying the recesses of your shadow cabinet.

    Reply
  4. Dave says:
    January 18, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    Thanks for the comments.

    mb – I’m glad. Kind of you to say so.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

URLs are converted to links, and three or more links in one comment will cause it to be sent to the moderation queue. Constructive criticism is always welcome. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Smorgasblog

    • Metaphors for the Moon
      Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
      of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

    • Cleaning My Attic
      Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

    • Clumps and Voids
      The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

    • botanizing
      On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

    • The Twitching Line
      My uncle, gutting a fish:
      removing the fins from either side,
      tipping the knife below

      the little anus, pointing the tail-
      end away, slitting it to the gills,
      then plunging in a hand

      to scoop the organs out, soft
      and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

    • The Ordinary and the Wild
      I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

    • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
      So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

    • Chatoyance
      And on the other side, what I
      set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
      a crease scored in bent blades of grass
      where I forgot the wall stood,
      my footsteps blurring as the
      grass unbends.

    • Velveteen Rabbi
      There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

    • Will Buckingham
      My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

  • Read more (Archives)

    Subscribe to Smorgasblog

  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
    — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

`