Erythronium americanum
How did
this trout
escape
the stream?
It’s not only
the leaves—
ichthyomorphic
& mottled,
glossy as fins—
but the salmon-
colored stem’s
leap
& arc,
& the way it falls
with a sun-
bright splash.
Trout Lily
Letter to Spam
Can you keep a secret? They will never know. In my e-mailbox at work this morning, this message: When wearing one of Practically Genuine’s clones, you won’t have to worry about being caught. How? We manufacture all our products (from the inside/out). Using the same metals, markings, materials as the originals ensures the perfect clone. In 1936 the pantywaist was a type of child’s garment with short pants that buttoned to the waist of the shirt. In Old English, a stole is a long robe, a scarf-like garment. Clergymen wore it. Frankly, I much prefer the sixteenth century use of doublet (root, Fr. duble) as “one of two things that are alike.” Keep this quiet and your friends, family, co-workers, and loved ones will never know the difference. Six inches of fresh powder. A pair of squirrels will wrestle in it, then go up the big maple, couple on the trunk, retreat to separate limbs. All those little gropings in the shadows. Do you need a translator? Think of it. History is full of copies, some of them cutting themselves out of the landscape right now.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 22 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Fairy Bells
Prosartes lanuginosa
Their ringing isn’t obvious;
you need the ear
of an anchorite to find them.
Listen for water tricking under rocks,
a black-throated green warbler’s
five wheezy notes.
Look beneath creased leaves
& zigzag branches
for a bell of quiet yellow-green
that flares into a six-pointed star,
anthers facing outward
around a stout style—
all of which must drop away
to swell the bell’s heir,
a scarlet clapper.
Letter to Rubbermaid and Tupperware
Dear aggregate of semi-synthetic solids, dear
clear acrylic, polyester, silicone, polyurethane
or halogenated plastics; menagerie of molded
food boxes separated from their lids and falling
to the floor as I root around in the kitchen
cabinets— I’m certain my ancestors could not
have had the same early morning dilemmas
as I do: where to stash that bit of leftover
scrambled egg or steel-cut oatmeal, which
cute snack holder will keep the grade-
schooler’s cut-up kiwi and blueberries
from spilling and turning the bottom of her
book bag into a mulch of paper and fruit.
Outside, chipmunks traverse a fresh cement of
wintry mix, their tails italic with urgency.
A bento box holds carrot flower cups and
shiso leaves against neat rows of jeweled rice.
Here, shelves of ice-coated branches rattle
in the wind; unrolled, how far east would their
cellophane sheets reach? On highland trails
in my childhood home, woodsmen make
their way to town with provisions in leaf-
lined baskets: boiled shoots and purple yams,
salads of curly fern; dried venison and quail
fermented with smoke, salted with dew.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 21 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Link roundup: Photosynthesizing salamanders, revolutionary women, and single-sentence animations
Nature News: “A Solar Salamander”
Holy cow! New research shows that the spotted salamander, a common species here, may be partly solar-powered thanks to a mutualistic relationship with a photosynthetic alga inside its cells, something previously unknown among vertebrates.
CommonDreams.org: “‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech”
Apparently wearing a peace t-shirt and turning your back on the Secretary of State is considered provocative behavior. Even if she happens to be talking about the rights of peaceful protesters.
Heraclitean Fire: Read the World challenge
Harry Rutherford is a blogger’s blogger — someone who seems able to say something insightful on nearly any topic, from art to birding to football, and never gets stuck in any particular groove. His Read the World challenge is an on-going series of book reviews in which he attempts to read at least one book from every country in the world.
Haiku News
This is not news about haiku, but news in haiku — and good haiku, not the folk kind. Their motto is “the personal is the political is the poetical.” I’d like to see more poetry zines responding to the news in this way. Such as…
Verse Wisconsin: Poems About WI Protests
An on-going collection (scroll up for the call for submissions) proving that the news isn’t always what it seems. For example:
The state of Wisecrack is facing an immediate deficit of $137 milquetoasts for the current fishmonger year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 milquetoasts for a prior raid of the Patriarchy Compensation Funeral.
Al Jazeera: “Women of the Revolution”
Three Egyptian woman talk about their experiences during the revolt.
Moving Poems forum: “Electric Literature’s single-sentence animations: videopoems for fiction”
Electric Literature magazine’s video series proves that, at least where film adaptations are concerned, sufficiently artful prose is indistinguishable from poetry.
The Observer: “What does the Arab world do when its water runs out?”
Conserve?
If you care about freedom, in Egypt or anywhere else, or use social networks, watch this. (FOSDEM=Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting.) Eben Moglen is head of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this address (part 3), he announces the formation of a new foundation to create a truly decentralized, tyranny-proof internet. Awesome.
Phoenicia Publishing’s February sale on qarrtsiluni print editions
Now through the end of the month, receive $2.00 off on our four print anthologies, including the new “Words of Power.” Details on website.
Letter to Levity
Dear buoyancy, dear levity, dear
little digression; dear necessary respite
from gravity and circumspection, your voice is
just audible over the wind like a junco’s chitter—
Leaves like tongues lift off from the newly melted
forest floor, busily trading all kinds of news
from the world— for instance, why did I not know
before today of Qaddafi’s all-girl coterie of virgin
bodyguards, smart as models in their khaki outfits;
or of how he sometimes likes to camp out in five-
star hotel gardens in a sumptuous, heated Bedouin
tent guarded by a camel? Or of Unsinkable Molly B,
the cow that jumped a slaughterhouse gate and fled
authorities by swimming across the Missouri river?
(She’s safe now in a Montana sanctuary.) They say
that Elton John’s in town this weekend: I want to know
if he’s traveled with the same grand piano that workers
in Tsarkoye Selo scratched their heads over, wondering
how to hoist it through the narrow windows of Catherine
the Great’s gilded ballroom. And what about those three
men in Malaysia who made off with 725,000 condoms
(still missing), or the Mexican woman now on her ninth
day of a hunger strike, demanding an invitation to Prince
William’s wedding? A 35 year-old naked man was captured
on surveillance video taking sausages from the kitchen
of a retirement home. Who knows why these things happen?
Perhaps an inexplicable longing seized them all in the night,
some order not to be disobeyed flashed on in the cortex
of the brain. Once, my daughter’s piano teacher mistook
a gift of strawberry body butter for yogurt. She called,
half laughing and half in pain, saying she was just
so hungry, that it smelled so beautiful and good; and
suddenly she wanted it, more than anything in the world.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 19 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Bento Boxes
Tweny-five years ago I outsourced my motivation to the Japanese. I wore the Kansai humidity like a second skin and shaved my beard to get closer to the soup. I went to all kinds of extremes, even fell in love. Anything to avoid going to class.
Opening a bento was like taking the roof off a cheap apartment building, the kind where you can hear every word through the thin walls but understand nothing. I speak from experience: the woman in the next apartment had a screaming orgasm every afternoon at 3:00. My roommate took to accompanying her on the guitar.
I spent so much time in one noodle bar, an older construction worker became my official sponsor and paid for everything. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t communicate very well because we had very little to communicate other than respect on my part and kindness on his. The other people in the noodle bar schooled me in how to behave.
Their economy was booming then, and it took a lot of asking around to find where the homeless lived, over near the Osaka zoo, behind a fence: another bento box. I went there with a friend. We sat down on a bench and waited for someone to join us; it didn’t take long. He’d come down from the north 16 years before to work at the World’s Fair, he said, and never went back.
The only foreigner I met who’d completely mastered the language, modern and classical, was a drunk who went to sleep in the middle of an empty street. Flies, I heard him mutter, why do you always call on me when I’m not home?
Written for the > Language > Place blog carnival.
Deer guts and other haiku
I’ve spent the evening revising a bunch of old photoblog haiku. Many are still stinkers, but here are a few that seemed salvageable. (First lines are linked to the posts.)
shining viscera
I want to pick out
all the hairs
bare quarry rock
just half a mile away
already looks blue
rain beads
on each numbered leaf
in the study group
beside the oak
with a huge round hole
an uncanny silence
back field
fog drifts through branches
rigid with ice
free of its seeds
the dried wild mustard
looks ready for anything
moon in eclipse
I remember every place
I’ve seen that ember
a crowd of weed stalks
they’ll all fall down
when the snow melts
their calls must’ve changed
no hint of Canada now
in these local geese
“No Swimming”
meltwater shimmers
atop the ice
plastic trail marker
the click beetle’s antennae
sweep back and forth
ancient hemlock grove
I find the patch of moss
where I once spent the night
Thaw
If I were a brook I would unwind
like a spool in the sun, shake my green
maracas with sequined stones.
If I were a beet in the soil I’d pulse
like a heart, pull myself out
of my muddy shroud.
If I were a bowl of new
steamed rice I’d curl fringes of steam
and float a grateful face above it.
All over the newly bare field, melting
voices— whispering, murmuring, sighing
and gurgling a hundred ways at once.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 18 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
False Hellebore
Veratrum viride
Bright green.
Tight green.
Clasping green.
Grasping green.
Armed green.
Charmed green.
Hairy green.
Scary green.
Ribbed green.
Nibbed green.
Panicle-green.
Planticle-green.
Patient green.
Abortifacient green.
Killing green.
Thrilling green.
Burning green.
Churning green.
Convulsive green.
Repulsive green.
Rain-calling green.
Down-falling green.
Green green.
Black.
*
Note: The Latin name means “true-black green.” The black roots were widely used by Native Americans for apotropaic magic and other ritual purposes. The entire plant is toxic.