Long after his head, torso, & prayerful forelegs have fallen prey to her ravenous love-bites, the male mantis stays joined to the female & continues to pump, automatic as a Tibetan prayer wheel: OM the jewel in the heart of the lotus. OMG.
Final thought on Eliot Spitzer
The dirtiest corner is always the one where the brooms are kept.
Self-portrait in proverbs
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A footprint is a sign; a handprint is a message.
This one says: I choose transparency because that’s the best way to hide.
Solitude is a salt lake with five inlets.
Sand can return to stone, but can glass ever return to sand?
My hand was so thick, I couldn’t see the fog in front of me.
Ice is a form of immobility that doesn’t keep. By the time I got my photos of the ice storm home & took them out of my camera, they had already lost almost all their glitter.
When the sky falls, it clings to everything. Trees snap with the weight of it. Beauty is best kept at arm’s length.
If it weren’t for wonder, I might have to go make something of myself.
Trees in the winter aren’t sleeping; they’re procrastinating.
Always remember that nature is out to kill you.
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Inspired by the posts at the communal self-portrait site Autography (tagline: “Self-Portrait as Story”).
Polyporous
Betula lenta, “pliant birch tree.” It’s true: a black birch is almost always more resilient than a white one, more likely to straighten back up after bearing a translucent burden of ice. Only in death does it lose its give and become rigid with listening, all its ears turned downward for news of the earth.
For more winter fungi, see A Passion for Nature‘s fungi category. Jennifer’s even putting together a book on the subject.
My words
My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy
–W. S. Merwin, “When You Are Gone,” The Lice
Making sense
Qarrtsiluni, the online literary magazine I help curate, is now soliciting for submissions to a new theme, Making Sense. “We challenge you to build up a world in scent, taste, touch, sound, or any combination of these. … To have a full and concrete awareness of space, physical detail, and emotion, you do not need sight,” the editors write.
Last weekend, I ate both eyes of a fish. They were slightly sour, and full of a salty juice that couldn’t be tears. Later, somebody told me: You’ll never cry again!
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If you saw your nose all by itself, would you recognize it? What would it smell like?
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A. sat on the floor and sketched our feet as we listened to Bach’s partitas for solo violin. You can tell from the sketches: those feet had completely forgotten that they were feet.
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Conversing with someone who is undergoing a massage is a bit like consulting a Ouija board. The words hold extra weight for passing through the hands, but it’s hard to tell where they’re coming from.
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I’ve been single for so long, I like to go out in the rain just for the contact.
Leaf-taking
Follow the sign of the leaf. Climb. Go.
All veins lead to the bright midrib,
between the twin nipples,
and over the great divide of the palm.
Holey
The tiger swallowtail nectaring in the bull thistles has a small hole in its left wing, like a missing pane in a stained glass window that tempts bored children with a glimpse of the sky.
There are so many holes in my knowledge. The harvestman hiding in the bergamot is missing a pair of legs on its right side — does that mean it must keep two of its eyes closed if it wants to avoid walking in circles?
A bergamot leaf with a large hole plays temporary host to both a treehopper and a tumbling flower beetle, who completely ignore each other: the former has as little use for tumbling as the latter has for hopping.
A green, spotted leaf beetle scales the tip of a leaf and stands motionless for more than a minute as if suddenly self-aware, gazing at all the green leaves spotted with meal-sized holes.
False faces
The number of times that natural selection has pulled eyespots from its magic hat tells us that humans are not the only animals for whom a face is a beacon.
The difference is that we draw inferences that a bird, for example, would not.
Wherever we see eyes: that could be me. So many imaginary friends!
But maybe it’s only the backside of a click beetle, or some other prodigy of a trickster universe. The trap springs. The mask possesses its wearer.
Whereas a cardinal can spend all summer warring with its reflection in the implacable eyes of the house.
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“False Faces” was the name the Jesuits gave to the preeminent medicine society of the Haudenosaunee and other Iroquoian peoples.
As for my blogging and internetting, I’m trying to think positively about slowness.
Proverbial
A cat living by her wits goes hunting in a downpour.
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As patience to a predator, so is imagination to the prey. The field mouse that thinks, “It’s only rain” won’t live to bear another litter.
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When the birds start scolding, the mice relax.
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To the turtle in its shell, the thunder sounds like nothing more consequential than indigestion.
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If the swallows in the belfry had their way, we’d live without news.