Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
A falling leaf
reversed course
& flew.
It sailed up
over the trees
& didn’t stop until
it reached a forest
inside a cloud
in Panama.
You were left
with a double loss:
of the leaf it wasn’t
& of the bird it was.
On the ground
where the leaf
would’ve settled,
some rustling animal
vanishes
into a wrinkle
of wind.
Just a brief housekeeping note: I’m experimenting with a new commenting system here to try and reduce the number of automated spam comments that come in. As a side benefit(?), you can now log in from your Facebook, Twitter, or WordPress.com accounts if you so choose. Let me know if that makes your lives immeasurably more convenient.
For other self-hosted WordPress bloggers who might be interested, I’m using Jetpack Comments. I’ll be curious to see what it does to page-load times. Other comments plugins already in place include Bad Behavior, which has cut automated comment spam submissions by about two thirds, and Akismet, which still does a great job blocking at least 99% of all spam from appearing on the site, with very few false positives. Why worry about spam comment submissions if so few of them ever make it through Akismet’s filters? Because every submission refreshes the page, regardless of how well the site might be cached, so that an intense spam storm can be a real drain on server resources. Like most websites, Via Negativa is on a cheap shared webhost, and a year ago got booted off its previous webhost for using too much CPU — precisely because I didn’t understand how automated comment spam can produce CPU spikes.
UPDATE (10/19): There appears to be a conflict with Bad Behavior, so I’ve deactivated the latter plugin for now. (Depending on what happens with spam comments, I may end up reactivating it and deactivating Jetpack comments.)
UPDATE 2 (10/21): Wow, this is MUCH better than Bad Behavior at stopping spam comments! Only three have made it through to be caught by Akismet in the past two days (normally it would be around 100). The main downside I see to this system is the longer delay after posting a comment, but that doesn’t seem like to big a deal. Also, it conflicted with the comments subscription plugin I was using before, so I had to switch to the Jetpack-provided option, making me even more reliant on the plugin.
Rachel’s visit has been, as usual, much too short. On our last full day together, we drove around the Seven Mountains region of central Pennsylvania in the Rothrock State Forest, ending up at Alan Seeger Natural Area.
Continue reading “Autumnal”
The skull whose name was smoke spoke
worm words. Its missing teeth hissed
from the gizzard of an owl.
How odd, I thought, to be a skull
& haunt a body from within!
The air smelled of rotting
leaves; it was October.
Icy feathers began to form
on the edges of grass blades—
the only kind of next life
that made sense to me, stoned as I was.
My gut gurgled polyphonically.
I considered fear as if from a great height.
I have company on my porch these days. Knitting is happening,
Continue reading “Unknitting”
So now I know it’s not really going to get easier. But perhaps it can keep becoming more fluid. Perhaps I can feel my way into the ephemerality of every hard moment.
Somehow the ephemerality of the happy moments, the strong ones, the softly joyful ones, is always to the fore. But it’s not just the good bits, it’s all of it: here, blink, gone. Hard, but not fixed; never lengthy; a flickering, ever-changing string of moments.
I increasingly wonder if the enormity of confronting this is what lies behind so much of human madness, cruelty, masochism; behind our obsessive need to build boxes, lock our own cell doors as well as other people’s.
We hadn’t planned our Adirondacks camping trip to coincide with the peak of fall color — in fact, my hiking buddy Lucy and I hadn’t really thought about it at all, because we see the fall foliage display every year, and we knew that if we didn’t catch it at its peak there, we’d certainly see it here. We just wanted to show Rachel one of our favorite places. (It also didn’t hurt that another blogger friend happened to live less than two hours away.) Hell, we were even foolish enough to think the campgrounds would be virtually deserted, as they had been the last time we’d visited the Adirondacks in October. No such luck.
Instead, we found ourselves hopping from campsite to campsite as spots became open in what had otherwise been a fully booked campground in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. (Thank you, rainy weather!) The cold rain might have made hiking and camping less than optimal, but it did nothing to diminish the autumn colors. And our British visitor seemed suitably wowed — that’s her arm in the photo above, gesturing in inarticulate appreciation at the drops of water dangling from the ends of shed white pine needles ornamenting a balsam fir bough. Though I did bring my own camera along, I had a hard time seeing things afresh. There’s just nothing like seeing something for the first time, as Rachel’s Adirondacks photo set attests. Go look, and prepare to be wowed yourself.
(Just back from a week in the Adirondacks. More soon.)
I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. Epigrammatic posts and humor have been mainstays of Via Negativa from the beginning. Here’s a post that bridged the two categories. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)
19. Misery loves company. Specifically, the Frito-Lay Company, makers of Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, Tostitos, Ruffles and Lay’s brand snack chips. Frito-Lay.TM Food for the fun of it!TM
20. Before doing X, always ask yourself, “What would happen if everyone did X?” If the answer is, “Cataclysmic war and social chaos, leading to the rapid extinction of most higher life forms,” then it’s probably a pretty good way to turn a profit.
21. Some people see things as they are and ask, “Why?” Some people dream of things that never were and ask, “Why not?” If you know either of these kinds of people, please call the Department of Homeland Security’s toll-free hotline.
I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. I used to post stories more often than I do now — sometimes true ones, and sometimes fictional ones that started out as if they were nonfiction, just because I liked to mess with readers’ heads. I seem to recall the original comments (via Haloscan, subsequently lost like all comments left before April 2006) included one or two confessions from readers who continued to think it was a true story even after the passage quoted here. (Please click through to read the whole story.)
“You make them yourself?” I asked, remembering that her parents had been artists.
That laugh again. “Oh, it’s not like I have a forge in my backyard or anything…”
Then, perhaps sensing my frustration, she knelt down and pointed out the outline of a dog sitting on its haunches. “They’re so popular with dog lovers… Anyone who’s ever had a companion animal knows what a deeply spiritual connection that can be… Like my Hermione here? Would you like to say hello to Dave? Dave, this is Hermione…”
There was a dog on my bed. A brown and tan mongrel – a beagle-border collie mix, by the look of it. “Hello,” it said.