I wonder what air
& daylight mean
to the boletes holding
their brown platters up,
or to Indian pipes
with their white
swan necks?
I guess it’s dissolution
that they’re after
here aboveground,
where you need
some kind of hide
or cuticle to hold
the darkness in.
They’re hoping for
a fetid breeze or
brush of insects—
whatever they can get.
Just now, sorting laundry
fresh from the line
in my warm bedroom,
I reached into
a black sweatshirt
to turn it rightside out
& found the evening
coolness hidden
in its sleeves.
In less than a minute after entering the woods, I acquire an aura of insects. I step carefully through knee-high wood nettles with my hands in the air, peer at the screen in the back of my camera as if it were an escape hatch, and focus on the one still fly.
Now that they are silent and surrounded by new forest, we want the lime kilns to bear more than a passing resemblance to Mayan temples — to have been shrines to something other than greed and toil. We want their gaping to reflect openness rather than consumption, and their standing apart to signify fidelity to a transcendent vision, one that was always intended to culminate in a hillside of yellow moccasin flowers, tulip trees dripping with nectar, and an abandoned mine harboring endangered bats.
A thunderstorm shakes me out of sleep in the small hours. I lie awake listening to non-human screams — cat? Raccoon? In the morning, I peer up into the crevasse between the portico and the house, as if the bat’s sleeping face held any clues. The peonies are bent double with their latest haul of rain.
Yeah, I know it’s the wrong time of year, but the music made me do it — that, or else I have what Wallace Stevens called a mind of winter. Encouraged in part by a post by Lucas Green — “poets, poems, and videotape” — in which he argued that poetry is fundamentally an oral art, I wanted to see what would happen if I put more thought into the soundtrack, mixing voice and music in Adobe Audition first, then cutting and splicing video clips to fit. I’d been searching the free music site Jamendo.com for something to use in a different poem when I happened across the Sound Sculptures of one daRem, and immediately thought of my old poem “Therapy.” The composer describes her/his five tracks as “Experimental ambient music with a dark, but calm touch. Originally written for use as music for art exhibitions of my father.”
The extended version of “Therapy” includes a prose introduction, haibun-style, but when pondering video possibilties this morning, I couldn’t see how to make that work. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination, and I’m simply too much of a neophyte to know how to switch registers like that and make it work.
I appreciate the dissenting views on the value of music in the comments to my previous video, and I’ll be curious to see if my inclusion of a piece of experimental electronica this time also meets with opposition. My basic goal with poetry soundtracks, I think, is to find pieces that fit the mood I was in when I wrote the poem. One problem, though, is that music with a regular rhythm may conflict with the rhythms in the poem. So it probably makes more sense to search avant-garde classical, electronic, and ambient music — or less-composed soundscapes, if I can find them. (I’d need a dish microphone to gather my own ambient audio, so that probably won’t happen for a while.)
I’m not sure about the effect I gave my voice here. I think that could be better. But the main thing I learned today was that fairly lengthy spaces between stanzas or sentences can work so long as music is present.
Which is good, because I think such spaces are really important to aural comprehension: the main problem most people have with poetry readings is that the words go by too damn fast, at least with poems composed for the page. Modern lyrical poetry is nothing if not dense with layered meanings and images. Slam poetry works, when it works, because it’s not terribly subtle, and because it tends to repeat phrases and ideas, in common with almost all truly oral poetry. But more than once I’ve had the experience of buying a book or chapbook by an outstanding live performer only to find that the energy didn’t translate to the page. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed by lackluster readings from poets whose written work I love. So now I’m wondering: are Lucas and I crazy to dream of a hybrid between the two?
*
By the way, I apologize to readers on dial-up. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy and videography is what I want to learn right now, so I’m afraid you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of this kind of blog post.
After dark, when the woods
turn back into a forest,
go stand under an umbrella
& let your prim column
of not-rain become
as anonymous as the others.
Count the drips until you lose
track of everything else.
Inhale the fertile aroma
of log-rot & truffle
as if it were the freshest tea.
Ignore the lightning flash,
what it does to the ground:
a stark here-&-now
of sticks & leaves into which
it no longer seems possible
to sink. Raise your face
to the false vault of ribs.
The chair in the forest accommodates
a cushion of moss — better than
the bedspring, which collects dead leaves
& the rare blackberry sprout.
The canes never get too far
in their explorations of the dappled light
before a deer discovers them & has them
for breakfast, spines & all, threading
her hooves through the rusty coils
& the jumble of squarish stones
where walls once rested.
High overhead, a scarlet tanager
grooms under his wingpits
during each pause in his recital.
If only the lice that live humdrum lives
in the forest of his feathers
could see him as we do! An idea
of perfection, a glimmering jewel
alone in the overgrown void.
***
In an old edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone once responded to the Spaceship Earth metaphor as like being out in the New Mexico night, looking at the stars, and gasping “it’s just like the planetarium!”
—Chris Clarke
For years, I’ve greeted the day by sitting out on the front porch of my 150-year-old cottage in a mostly wooded hollow in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. It’s a habit I began back when I was a smoker, I guess. Fresh from a hot shower, I find if I bundle up enough and cradle a thermos mug of coffee in my hands, I can sit outside even in the middle of January, though I might not last for more than 15 or 20 minutes on the coldest days. The porch sits high above a small, overgrown yard, which is adjacent to the woods’ edge, the headwaters of Plummer’s Hollow Run, and a small cattail marsh next to the old springhouse. Due to this strategic location, it’s probably one of the best spots for watching wildlife on the mountain. If I sit still enough, the animals quickly forget I’m there.
This daily habit of quiet observation is very important to me. Even if the rest of my day is taken up with busyness and distractions, at least I’ll have had a short period of attentiveness to the natural world to keep me grounded and keep my writing from straying too far into the ether. When I began blogging in December 2003, I had some idea that I would focus on religious agnosticism — whence “Via Negativa” — but within a very short time, morning porch observations began to creep in, and pretty soon I dropped all pretence of a focus in favor of writing about whatever popped into my head first thing in the morning.
In November of 2007, I started a new online experiment: using Twitter to record daily observations from the front porch. I unexpectedly found the 140-character limit a goad to lyricism. Like the French writers in the Oulipo movement, I’ve always been interested in “seeking new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy,” especially those involving artificial constraints. I hadn’t meant to write poetry, but readers on Twitter began to assure me that’s what I was doing, and who am I to argue?
I soon began backing up these posts to a blog — The Morning Porch — and in July of 2008, switched from Twitter to the much more reliable and feature-rich, open-source alternative Identi.ca as my primary microblogging platform, though I continue to forward my updates to Twitter via an automatic bridge.
My main goal with this project, I suppose, is to excite curiosity about and appreciation for the natural world among other users of Twitter and Identi.ca (and to some extent, my contacts on Facebook, where my Morning Porch posts also appear via an application for Friendfeed, another micromessaging service which I use mainly for lifestreaming purposes). Both as a poet and as a nature-lover, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to reach beyond traditional audiences, and not just preach to the choir. A loose-knit community of poets, geeks, and other assorted misfits has sprung up on Identi.ca, which is to Twitter roughly as a very cool party is to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There are many more birders recording their observations on Twitter, perhaps influenced by that service’s songbird iconography, but I don’t consider myself a birder — I’m not particularly interested in keeping lists or identifying rare nonresident species — so I haven’t made an active effort to connect with them, beyond following those whose blogs I already read. There are also active groups of poets, gardeners, eco-freaks, and other compatible folks on Twitter, though they’re slow in discovering each other due to the lack of effective, platform-internal semantic tagging and group tagging — features I’ve grown used to on Identi.ca.
Oddly, perhaps, given its origin on social networking services, I haven’t installed a comments system on the Morning Porch blog. The posts themselves are so short, I guess I’m resistent to the idea of burdening them with commentary; if folks want to comment, they can simply join Identi.ca and respond there. Also, the platform I’m using, Tumblr, doesn’t have native comments, and I’m reluctant to commit to an external commenting system because there’s a good chance I’ll move the blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation at some point. (Tumblr has promised to introduce an export tool.)
I hope to keep the Morning Porch chronicle going for at least five years, and I envision a synoptic nature book with one page for each day of the year, five paragraphs or stanzas per page. Since I hardly ever leave home, this seems doable. But it’s also fun to go back and re-read sections of the journal in the order they were written. Looking at my posts from last May, for example, one can gain some appreciation for the two great dramas of a northern Appalachian spring: the return of neotropical migrant birds and the leafing out of the forest canopy. In May, more than any other time of the year, the forest is a-twitter.
***
May 1, 2008
Roar of the quarry in my left ear, burble of a wren in my right, and in the front yard a catbird sits in the lilac, silent, head swiveling.
May 2
Two Jurassic-like things, both of them “great”: the call of a great-crested flycatcher, and seconds later, a great blue heron in flight.
May 3
The air smells of rain. A large robber fly buzzes into my weed garden and lands on the underside of a dame’s-rocket leaf.
May 4
The bleeding-heart I bought yesterday, still in its pot, pulls in the first hummingbird of the year: shimmery red gorget, grotesque blooms.
May 5
Bright sunny morning. A hooded warbler bursts from the white lilac; for a moment I think it’s a yellowthroat with his mask on wrong.
May 6
Full leaf-out is still a week or two off. In the green wall of woods across from my porch, the dawn sky leaks through a hundred holes.
May 7
Behind the lilac, the sounds of a fierce wood thrush altercation. A third thrush lands close by and swipes its bill against the branch.
May 8
Rain at dawn. In the half-light, the green is intense. Add the bell-like tones of wood thrushes, and the effect is other-worldly.
May 9
Rain. Have robins always had white spots on the ends of their tails? Yesterday afternoon, four eastern kingbirds in the field—unmistakeable.*
May 10
Two myrtle colonies are closing in on what’s left of my lawn. In the grass, the green fists of bracken open complex fingers to the rain.
May 11
Sunday, and one can hear between bursts of oriole song the creaking of wings, the drone of a bumblebee, a deer snorting a quarter-mile off.
May 12
Black-throated green: the warbler lisping at the woods’ edge, but also the woods itself, green-feathered, trunks running dark with rain.
May 13
Cold and clearing. The black cat pads up the driveway, coyote bait still in her belly** and the usual hungry, hateful look in her yellow eyes.
May 14
At first light, the silhouette of a hawk in a dead tree above the corner of the field. A small rabbit grazes in the yard, ears twitching.
May 15
Cloudy and cool. A tanager’s plucked string; no glimpse of scarlet. Where are they off to, the hummingbirds that keep zooming past my porch?
May 16
At 6:00, the sky grows dark again as a storm approaches. Wood thrushes start back up. The lilac’s white torches all point at the ground.
May 17
The same woodpeckers and nuthatches that we heard all winter, but with flickering leaves. The same wind as yesterday, but with golden light.
May 18
A black-and-white warbler’s two-syllable whisper; drumroll from a Good God bird. The clock is blinking—what time IS it? The patter of rain.
May 19
Birdcall like the chant of some demented sports fan: the yellow-billed cuckoo is back! The forest canopy must be full enough to skulk in.
May 20
A gray squirrel seems to be in heat: as in January, the slow-motion chases, the soft scold-calls, but now mostly hidden by the leaves.
May 21
Sun! I hear the crow that thinks it’s a duck, a catbird’s simultaneous translation of a wood thrush song. Last night, I dreamed of bluejays.
May 22
A male robin scours the forest floor for twigs; the female combs the lawn for dead grass. The small thorn bush shakes when they both fly in.
May 23
The gibbous moon no sooner clears the trees than the sun comes up. First crystal-clear morning in weeks, and I’m off to New Jersey.
May 26
Robins mating on a branch: one-second contacts spaced half a minute apart. Each time the male flies off and the female ruffles her feathers.
May 27
Warm, humid, and overcast. In the side garden, the first twelve yellow irises opened in the night. Small flies walk all over my legs.
May 28
The flower heads on the white lilac are half-brown now. Two phoebes take turns flying into the bush, momentarily quelling insistent peeps.
May 29
Clouds like scales on the belly of a blue fish. In the garden, ants immobilized by the cold cling to the sweet pink seams of peony buds.
May 30
In one direction, a singing wood thrush; in the other, a red-eyed vireo. Evocative refrain or dull repetition? It’s all in the delivery.
May 31
In the light rain, a squirrel feasts on red maple keys. Reduced to pieces, the blades flutter straight down, robbed of all ability to spin.
_____
*A white tip on the tail is a diagnostic feature of the eastern kingbird.
Page iv, Acknowledgements: For “All the lovely ladies at Square Peg’s Round Hole in Crested Butte, Colorado” read “Carla, without whom none of this would matter”
Page 2, line 34: For “incessant screaming” read “frequent, energetic vocalization”
Page 8, line 3: For “heavily sedated” read “diagnosed with ADHD”
Page 14, line 11: For “Napalm Death” read “Bruce Springsteen”
Page 18, line 56: For “used” read “experimented with”
Page 23, line 5: For “two six-packs and a defective condom” read “a full moon”
Page 27, line 42: For “severe depression” read “the blues”
Page 31, line 10: For “anger management classes” read “continuing education”
Page 34, line 61: For “Harley-Davidson” read “second mortgage”
Page 36, line 4: For “restraining order” read “separation”
Page 36, line 22: For “social services” read “relatives”
Page 42, line 51: For “drug mule” read “adventure tourist”
Page 43, line 14: For “prison” read “group therapy”
Page 49, line 1: For “hair implants” read “Promise Keepers retreat”
Page 51, line 34: For “heart attack” read “wake-up call from Jesus”
Page 55, line 35: For “a lonely female professional with low self-esteem” read “the new love of my life”
Page 57, line 70: For “layoffs” read “voluntary redundancy program”
Page 62, line19: For “harassment” read “witnessing to my faith”
Page 66, line 27: For “stoned” read “self-actualized”
Page 73, line 8: For “relatives” read “elder care facility”
Throughout: Replace dashes with semicolons
What made the stork ancestor of New World vultures forsake its obstretrics practice for the morgue?
Where does the wood thrush store its silver bells when it flies south for the winter?
Did the old trout learn how to lurk from studying ospreys?
Is it the excess of sky following a clearcut that gives cerulean warblers the blues?
If jewelweeds were never ensorceled by a hummingbird’s wand, would they still turn into touch-me-nots?
How many swallows does it take to make a summer?
Do winter wrens come back from the dead to haunt the enemies of clutter?
When a flock of grackles pivots around a hawk, are they trying to drive it mad?
Why do goldfinches go to all the trouble of building watertight nests if they never go boating?
What does a 25-pound wild turkey know about flying that a 3-pound chicken does not?
Would bitterns burp as loudly if they didn’t swallow frogs?
How do we know the loopy displays of male woodcocks aren’t aimed at the earthworms?
Does the cardinal attacking his reflection in the window learn to hate the color red?
Is the drumming grouse testing the air for ripeness, the way we thump melons?
What does the scarlet tanager see in our boring northern forests to justify an annual fight all the way from South America?
How many paper girls will it take to save the Japanese crane?
*
Two of my favorite books by Pablo Neruda are The Art of Birds and The Book of Questions. I wanted to try and write something in the style of both. I’ve crossposted a hyperlinked version to The Clade.
The fact that I still remember the word for moth in Japanese is a bit of a fluke — I’ve forgotten so much else. But it was etched in my mind because I used to crash on the couch of a guy who had a phobia about moths, of which there were plenty on muggy summer nights in Osaka. We’d be sitting around drinking, and suddenly he’d leap up yelling “Ga! Gaaaaa!” and waving his arms about, as if trying to take flight. Order would only be restored when the intruder was killed or managed to escape.
It happens that he and I were both mooning over the same woman then, though we’d made our peace with each other. There was a certain amount of comfort, in fact, in getting drunk with someone who shared your predicament down to the smallest detail: being in love with someone who had slept with another man — even if, as in our case, we were each other’s other man. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that heterosexual male bonding can’t be a beautiful thing.
The moths were small, pale, dusty creatures, not unlike the majority of moths here in the northeastern United States. Perhaps like our moths, they represented diverse species, some of them quite rare, and distinguishable one from another sometimes only by a careful examination of their genitalia. I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about biodiversity back then, and I was years away from reading Fabre’s classic studies that showed how moths’ acute sensitivity to pheromones makes them capable of detecting female moths from miles away. It is this capacity that allows some species to persist at very low population densities, as long as individuals of the opposite sex can still find each other on the far side of a forest, or a city — and can manage to escape moth-phobics with wildly waving arms.
And the lights, the lights. What explained the moths’ perennial and often fatal attraction to light? Centuries of tradition and the analogy with our own hormone- and alcohol-addled brains suggested that it was desire. That’s certainly how it looks. But to a moth, desire is signaled by chemicals — pheromones — picked up through the antennae. It turns out that a moth spirals into a light not out of desire but from sheer confusion. The only nighttime light of any brightness in their evolutionary history was the moon, and because the moon appears at optical infinity — far enough away that its rays are nearly parallel — it makes an excellent navigational aid. A moth can fly in a straight line simply by triangulating off the moon.
I seem to recall steadying myself by gazing at the moon on a drunken walk home more than once myself. Earlier that spring, there had been a full lunar eclipse, and I made a point of staying sober enough to appreciate it. I’ve seen three or four lunar eclipses since, and the only reason why I remember that one so vividly is because of my surprise at the aforementioned woman when, the next morning, she admitted she didn’t know the moon had been eclipsed. She had gone out with someone else, they’d had too much to drink, and when she caught sight of the blood-red moon she’d assumed the alcohol had affected her vision somehow, she said.
I wonder if she’d been with that other fellow, about whom I was still clueless at that point. How he must have danced when the moths lost their bright compass in the sky and came zeroing in, kamikaze-style, on the nearest substitute! When I think back on that time now, I really can’t recall, except in a very abstract sense, the desire I felt — only the confusion. Those lips and eyes I thought I’d never forget are indistinguishable now from dozens of others in my memory. But that soft rattle against rice paper, a small pale form turned suddenly into a figure of menace: that I can recall as clear as day. Ga!
Shortcut through the fields—
a brush of wings against
my moonlit face.
A few feet from the busy highway, next to the Advance Auto Parts store on the outskirts of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, two carloads of wildflower enthusiasts piled out and feasted their eyes on bloodroot, Dutchman’s-breeches, and the first purple trillium.
It might seem strange that so many delicate-seeming native perennials would flourish in what we like to think of waste places. But steep, rocky hillsides along roads and highways are among the few places where the over-abundant white-tailed deer don’t linger. Trash-strewn, noisy, polluted, and excessively vulnerable to weedy invasives though they may be, such places have become de facto wildflower preserves. You can walk for miles through the deer-haunted back-of-beyond and see little but brown from last year’s hayscented fern.
In a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton, the “Outskirts” are “an intermediate place, stalemate, neither city nor country,” and include “auto body repair shops in former barns.”
The stones throw their shadows abruptly like objects on the surface of the moon.
And these places just multiply.
Like what they bought with Judas’s money: “the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.”
But any place where trees are allowed to sprout and grow however they want, free from overzealous homeowners and unchecked herds of grazing animals alike, still offers the possibility of a sabbath — the return of balance to the earth’s economy. Profit and toil have not yet completely wrested it from the shyer and more indigent inhabitants of the earth. It still has the capacity to give more than it receives.
The land bought with blood money in Matthew 27:6-8, or fertilized with blood according to Acts 1:18-20, became a kind of sanctuary too. What had been an economically exploited piece of ground — a source of potter’s clay — was converted into a refuge, with the author of Acts quoting from Psalms: Let no man dwell therein… In similar fashion, the best display we wildflower hunters found last Saturday was a few miles farther to the southeast along the same highway, at the base of what had once been a very active quarry for ganister stone: the Thousand Steps, now publicly owned and managed as a Pennsylvania state gameland. The mountainside has recovered remarkably well in just a few decades, and indeed, now serves as a refuge for a state-threatened species, the Allegheny woodrat. On a beautiful, warm spring day, the parking area along the highway was crowded with visitors intent on climbing the eponymous steps and taking in the view from the top. We seemed to be the only ones there to peer at the ground.
After the long winter,
the flowers too are eager
to face the sun.
*
A lull in traffic.
The wildflowers grow still
on their thin stalks.
I’m doing one of these a day until the end of April. To send it, copy the permalink or the image file link into an email, tweet, Facebook DM, etc. — or just download and make free with the image.
I’m doing one of these a day until the end of April. To send it, copy the permalink or the image file link into an email, tweet, Facebook DM, etc. — or just download and make free with the image.
You always dreamed of a death
in the open, stopping at the wye
in the highway that runs past
the shell of the old mill,
the land like a black lung
infiltrated by bronchial trees.
You’d keep your eyes pinched shut
against whatever brightness might spoil
the immaculate desolation.
After so many tiresome years
of living for others, this would be
your own time at last,
alone on the baked earth.
But it seems the Father won’t let you off
that easy, sends a pair of his goons
to bookend your shoulders
& breathe cabbage in your ears.
Meaty arms wrap around your chest
like pythons & begin to squeeze.
Let’s go for a ride, they whisper.
Death in the open — you’re finding out —
means all bets are off. The air turns
dangerous with blades.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"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.
Smorgasblog
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----
Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
----
Timothy Green
As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality. We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other. And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.
----
Musings from Aotearoa
Aw shit, if you don't get it you don't get it. If these places and just the knowledge of them being there does not move you, then nothing here will. I can't come up with any clever arguments to change minds and sway people over from the Cement Jungle. It seems too entrenched, too set, and the disconnection from anything wild too complete. If we have already compromised 87% of our land and now need to attack the remaining 13% to get at its "real" value it would seem to suggest that something is inherently wrong with the system. Yet the machine grinds on.
----
Velveteen Rabbi
the sap already rising
will feed a million tiny banners
unfurling across the hills
and this small blue pill
will banish anxiety, restore to me
the woman I only dimly remember
----
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