Posted by Dave Bonta on April 1, 2009 (last modified at 12:09 am, 4/1/09)

Taking Steps
I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There’s a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There’s opera. There’s my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There’s the woman I’m marrying.

But I’ve never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It’s been years since I’ve pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.
—-

The above quote is the copyrighted work of its author. Please click through and read the entire post (and leave a comment there if you wish).

Filed in Smorgasblog. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.Print Print

  • Smorgasblog

    • Parmanu
      The flight took us towards Heidelberg. We approached it along a silvery streak (the Neckar), flew over a terraced hilltop oval (Thingstaette), the cramped rooftops (altstadt), a ruin in pink (the castle) and then turned around just as the sun sank behind the horizon. The places we had seen earlier --- and spent hours exploring --- flipped past us in an instant, and at that moment I could not decide what I liked better: the fleeting but striking impression from this height, or the slow immersion into those places below.

    • The House & other Arctic musings
      Another use of the seal, that as far as I know is particular to them is that the small intestine is relished. It is taken out, the contents squeezed out, a couple of plugs of blubber are then put in and squeezed through to further clean out the contents. Then they are coiled through each other for ease of handling and cooking. The intestines are eaten boiled, much like hollow sausages.

    • small change
      Oh Emily, I see you leap
      through your mother’s tatted dream
      of the hearted ballerina
      you don’t want to be. Your face
      a stage, wrought in shadows
      as it is, the lattice of discomfort,
      but the cushy seat of your reserve.

    • The Storialist
      A cute thing begs hyperbole,
      rhetorical questions:
      aren't you just the cutest...

      It is little, an it, a thing, small
      and low to the ground.

    • 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.

  • 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.

`