It snowed most of yesterday, small, wet flakes that stuck to everything, and this morning the water from my too-shallow well was faintly pink. On my way up to my parents’ house, a pair of small insects — caddisflies, or something similar — somehow found their way onto the toe of my right boot. They must have been mating in the snow when I picked them up. They were joined back to back, and walked in either direction quite ably, like the pushmi-pullyu in Doctor Doolittle.
I’ve written a couple new posts for the Plummer’s Hollow blog: Clash of the seasons today, and First snow two days ago.
I’ve also started a new writing exercise using the micro-blogging tool Twitter, which is designed mostly for people with mobile phones or Blackberries (I have neither) to post periodic updates on their activities. I won’t be doing that. Instead, I’m taking advantage of Twitter’s strict, 140-character limit, challenging myself once a day to answer the question, “What can I see or hear from my front porch while I drink my morning coffee?”
The results appear on my Twitter page, Morning Porch; in a feed that you can subscribe to, if you wish (you don’t have to join Twitter); and in the sidebar of Via Negativa’s home page, down below the blogroll feed, where I’ll limit the display to the ten most recent of these tweets, as they’re called.
Yeah, I know, the terminology is a little silly, but trust me: tweets and twitters make up the bulk of what I hear each morning.
It’s surprisingly difficult to condense a half-hour of observation into just 140 characters. My inspiration in this effort is Tom Montag, who kept a Morning Drive Journal about his daily commute for many years, though he was never quite that brief. Long-time readers might also remember that back in November 2004 I blogged the results of a front-porch journal I’d kept five years earlier. That effort ran out of inspiration after only a few weeks; I’m hoping to keep this up for a year.
*
My Gorgeous Somewhere
My magnetic poetry set promises lots of boring poems.
(and)
Guy on the elevator tells me to have a nice day, so I do.
Not enough options
among the magnetic words,
I have a nice day.
*
under the fire star
You can buy firecracker chains of 10,000 crackers — you unroll them down the length of the street, and they seem to go on exploding forever. I have been told that chains of 100,000 crackers are available too, but fortunately we’ve missed out on them so far. Big bangs and flowers of light rise above the popping crackers.
Lights can only be
so bright: hence the too-many bangs,
the too-sweet sweets.
*
bird by bird
This is what a surf scoter looks like, oiled. It doesn’t smell good either. This female is waiting in a warm pen till she’s stable enough to wash, probably tomorrow.
The thing with feathers
barely recognizable
under the oil.
*
Ah, to be stick figures
so nothing could cling for long,
neither snow nor tar.
White hair
Somewhere in NJ
The mind-reader’s name
seemed hollow after his death –
just me, rambling.
*
simply wait
In a hospital bed
with a view of bare branches,
dreams of long-lost homes.
*
Feathers of Hope
Placed on a white page,
the maggot looks anything
but white.
*
frizzyLogic
Lovely white hair
that crumples in the sun:
frost on a rose hip.
*
Burning Silo
Skull of a seabird
washed up before the sea was half-
finished with it.
*
the cassandra pages
Fed up with the blank page,
it’s so satisfying to make
a paper airplane!
*
tasting rhubarb
[photos of ice-skaters]
In a world of ice,
imagine how we would flock
to a walking rink!
*
Clouded Drab
Red and gold foil,
a glistening side of beef:
Christmas at the butcher’s.