Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
A college roommate once confessed
he fantasized about growing a vagina
on his shoulder: It would be
so handy, right there
whenever he needed to whisper
in its big wet ear.
John loved redheads & disliked feminists.
One woman informed me
he had “bedroom eyes.”
Where would the uterus go? I asked.
He laughed. It wouldn’t need one—
it would have me.
What about the pillow talk?
It would sing me to sleep, he said,
with its pulse of surf.
*
See Rachel’s photographic response, “Salty.”
Is it or isn’t it?
The sugar pill isn’t saying.
The line that bisects it
was intentionally left blank.
It’s a go sign, perhaps,
or a one-bead rosary.
Its zero gives birth
to all other numbers.
Since opposites attract within
bounds of reason & good breeding,
it must be in love
with a salt tablet.
It can be anything
the salt wants,
including another condiment
that cures vagueness.
Who do you say
that it is—
a prophet or the platter
for his savory head?
Like a double agent,
it forgets who it’s working for.
It’s either about to smile
or about to weep.
Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators.
[…]
Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form.
of the realm
real
even when plucked
from a magician’s ear
or exchanged
for better weather
its very ununiqueness
gives it value
its modularity
makes it fit to toss
edged in ridges
like a worn gear
it’s what one does
to new phrases
hoping they’ll
gain currency
mettle tested
between the teeth
unreal moon
eyelid for a corpse
legal
tender
Yeah, so “Love after 40” got upgraded by a decade and envideoed. The 1912 vaudeville clip is in the public domain, and comes courtesy of the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral film. The music by Mick Kelley (A.K.A. Ecklecticmick) is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. It’s a revamped “electroswing” version of an Ella Fitzgerald tune, “When I Get Low I Get High.” Rachel Rawlins kindly agreed to do the reading. It must be said that neither she nor I have yet to dress and act quite like the characters in the film, though I suspect that that’s kind of what some young people see when they catch sight of our graying hair and deeply uncool mannerisms.
Lightning roots deep into the sand,
donning an instant sheath of glass:
a seemingly pointless exercise in self-glove.
Clap of thunder.
Could it be, though, that radiance tires of itself?
Nowhere in the alleged blackness of space
is there any relief from the ticking,
pulsing, clusterfucks of stars
except on cold planets.
Who can blame lightning
for burrowing in like a tick?
Even we humans, full of darkness as we are,
go on pilgrimage to the ocean,
dream of girls with gills,
get buried up to our necks in sand
or swim with porpoises, whose
capacity for joy we suspect
of exceeding our own.
We go back to the sea like adopted children
paying a visit to our birth mother,
hoping that she’ll show some sign
she regrets giving us up:
some whelk, some dead star.
We tell prospective partners how
we love long walks on the beach
because it’s the deepest thing
we can think to say.
But only someone who knows the shore
well enough to recognize what she doesn’t know
will stop to pick up an odd
sandstone lump, & find
that it hides black glass.
She’ll sight through the short smooth tube,
hold it up to the sun like a sextant.
Ten books and three forthcoming books later—poetry, novels, and several fantasies for children—I can say that I do not regret my decision. I lost a good deal of security and salary, and I fell from the academic realm of writers, but I gained freedom to do exactly as I liked in words. No book I wrote would be needed for promotion or merit pay. I could strive as I liked, and could spend months in a way that might seem wasteful to others but was the path forward for me. I had no need to throw myself into print. As a young poet, and later as a poet and writer of stories and novels, I had no need to think better of my work than it deserved at the time.
This morning I decided it was time to remove Netscape from my PC. I hadn’t used it since 2006, but it was still patiently sitting there in my hard drive, all 29 megabytes of it, like a faithful hound that’s grown much too old to hunt. When I clicked “remove” on the Windows XP Add or Remove Programs utility, it generated its own sad screen, with “Netscape Browser Uninstall” in generic serif italics in the upper left corner, white on blue, as if it were trying to remind me of the good old days of WordPerfect 5.0, acoustic couplers and AOL. “Don’t you want to go for one more run around the field?” Sorry, old boy. It’s time for you to go to sleep and hunt rabbits in the blue screens of heaven.
Truth to tell, I never used Netscape very much, because I didn’t spend much time online before 1997, by which time Internet Explorer already seemed like a better option. But it mediated my first introduction to the World Wide Web: on a monitor in my brother’s basement office at Cornell back in 1995 or 96. As we waited for the page to load, the little animated icon of comets passing a rapidly spinning planet caught my eye, as it was meant to — something to stare at while data slowly crawled in over the telephone line, with the not-so-subtle message that this is the future, we’ve arrived. From Mountain View, California to the outermost reaches of the atmosphere, it was nothing but blue-black skies from now on.
The architects of the first mass-market web browser were very conscious of metaphor. The Wikipedia quotes an article from Macworld, May 1995:
Netscape Communications wants you to forget all the highway metaphors you’ve ever heard about the Internet. Instead, think about an encyclopedia — one with unlimited, graphically rich pages, connections to E-mail and files, and access to Internet newsgroups and online shopping.
But who would write those pages? Who would build that wondrous new netscape? Microsoft won the first browser war (as geeks sententiously call it) by giving their product away, a foretaste of much to come. What they couldn’t have known was that users would not be content to merely explore the internet, and that profits would not be the main motivator of those who would go on to create not only most of the best and most useful content on the web, but also the open-source code that now runs a great deal of it: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, WordPress, and of course Firefox, which is my main browser these days. That much neither Microsoft nor Netscape could have foreseen. But every time I upload files to Dropbox, Vimeo, Flickr or Google Docs, I am in a way indebted to Netscape’s starry-eyed vision:
Netscape advertised that “the web is for everyone” and stated one of its goals was to “level the playing field” among operating systems by providing a consistent web browsing experience across them. The Netscape web browser interface was identical on any computer. Netscape later experimented with prototypes of a web-based system which would enable users to access and edit their files anywhere across a network, no matter what computer or operating system they happened to be using.
These days we have a new metaphor for that. We call it the cloud.
Love after 50 doesn’t make the pop charts.
It’s too absurd.
Absurd as ice cubes settling in a glass
when one pours hot coffee over them,
shedding their sharp edges.
Absurd as the day-time ghost
of one’s breath on a cold morning.
Absurd as the smell of soil after a rain—
why should mere dirt outdo all other odors?
Absurd as grinding steel on
a wobbly bench grinder with a corroding belt,
that hair of sparks,
the pleasant way they prickle against the skin.
*
25 August 2012: Changed title from “Love After 40,” “50” seeming more resonant.
