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.
The Storialist
Oops, I’m sorry,
that isn’t your body.
Where are you in this tumbleweed
of light?
Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages
When I cease to be
what I am now will I become
something smooth, something
stripped and shaved, something
streamlined and spherical, all
function stilled?
Coyote Mercury
I read about fretting the neck and understand the principle, but a guitar has around 20 frets and that sounded to me like 20 opportunities to screw up the neck beyond repair and so I decided it would be a fretless ax and moved on to staining the neck.
Coyote Crossing
Sometime soon, in the next couple of weeks, I will head out to the Ivanpah Valley for a night or two, to greet its tortoises and cactus wrens, to photograph its big red-spined barrel cacti, to hike among its cholla and creosote for what may be the last time. I will grieve that I did not do more to preserve the land there and I will be thankful for the opportunity to give it a voice, however ineffective a voice mine may have been.
mole
My earliest memory is of being two years old, and unable to speak. I knew what language was, but I couldn’t master it. I stood there holding on to the arm of a sofa – shoulder height to me – and I longed, I longed to speak.
Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival
A cemetery is like an outdoor library, with stones to read instead of books. I skim the inscriptions like the text on the spines on books; title, author, publisher, the explicit temptation to take a book from the shelves and open it. You can’t open a grave like a book, but you can open your mind to the dead and hear the whispers.
the cassandra pages
Traveling to the studio in the morning, and back in the evening, I see things. A huge pink dahlia in someone’s front garden on a poor block, growing larger and heavier each day. A woman with a furrowed brow pushing her baby in a carriage, the baby with the same worried look on its face: the infant face of the mother. Two men in top hats and white shirts with waistcoats, riding Victorian bicycles, who appear and disappear like an apparition, leaving passersby staring after them down the street.
The Rain in My Purse
The mosquito is pendulous and slow, a smoky hovering presence you only know when it’s gone.
But the zanzara puts itself plainly in sight as an adversary.
Frogs and Ravens
Half a rock is still a rock, half a stone is not. Stones embody smooth perfection, the polishing of water and wave, the calm equanimity that comes from the abrasive effects of grinding against the small rocks of sand and soil. A rock, meanwhile, is chaos, a fractal of minerals, spiraling up and down, the large and the small.
slow reads
little rock, ark
to a pair of rocks,
the testicle that always drops
lower than the other
Will Buckingham
I don’t know if it has become progressively more difficult to write poems at Yellow Crane Tower, but certainly it does not have quite the allure of Li Bai’s time, and I was not wholly filled with literary inspiration during my visit. Here’s a picture from the roof. The tower, incidentally, was completely rebuilt in the 1980s. You can see the Yangtze in the distance, but it’s not exactly jade emptiness out there.
Pharyngula
Everything is fluid. Biology isn’t about fixed and rigidly invariant processes — it’s about squishy, dynamic, and interactive stuff making do.
Fragments from Floyd
Today, 92% of new American homes are air-conditioned, and most of the electricity to produce our cool air comes at the expense of Appalachian mountaintop coal, hence the paradox: greater indoor climate control contributes to an outdoor climate out of control.
Coyote Crossing
Worship isn’t love. It’s more like hatred. People worship you, they expect things in return for that worship. Handholding.
The Storialist
You are cautious
on your off day, creeping up to examine
your own moves and motives. Better to
hang back, wary, a dog sniffing at a stranger.
