Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also Words on the Street.
for Teju Cole
The kingdom of poetry is like a man who, having hired an expensive prostitute & taken her back to his apartment, kneels on the threadbare carpet in front of the chair where she has deposited her shed garments & lifts them one by one to his lips, weeping, while she sits in the kitchen wrapped in a blanket, eating General Tso’s Chicken straight from the box.
Can you read the sky? This one is a sign that means “unreadable” — a mackerel sky.
An altocumulus mackerel sky or mackerel sky is an indicator of moisture (the cloud) and instability (the cumulus form) at intermediate levels (2400-6100 m, 8000-20,000 ft). If the lower atmosphere is stable and no moist air moves in, the weather will most likely remain dry. However, moisture at lower levels combined with surface temperature instability can lead to rainshowers or thunderstorms should the rising moist air reach this layer. There is an old saying, “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.”
Beautiful, isn’t it? Let’s face it, stability and uniformity are boring.
Take rocks. Rocks are far from the paragons of stability we imagine them to be. Go for a walk across a boulder field sometime — it’s easy to lose your balance. Some rocks like to rock, some rocks like to roll, and you just have to keep movin’ and groovin’, as the song says. There are boulder fields in eastern Pennsylvania full of rocks that ring when struck, emitting clear, resonant tones. People come with mallets and go rock-hopping in search of a perfect pitch. Here on the mountain most of the rocks play dead, but some sleep with one eye open.
If you can’t put your trust in a rock, what else is there? A cipher, perhaps. The abstract truth of numbers. But somehow the mind rebels, and the numbers begin to take on completely extraneous qualities: sexy 6, owlish 8, 55 a pair of drummer’s brushes. 49 seems inexplicably tastier than 48. We could paint by numbers, green and green and green.
“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know,” Thoreau once wrote in his journal. “I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange.”
Total, totally: as if from heterogeneous reality to derive some unity, some gestalt. That too, says my inner Ecclesiastes, is so much empty grasping at the wind.
If each morning you could forget everything, including language itself, and could be reborn in a world free of signs, what would you see? Faces. Everywhere. We make the strange familiar simply by coming to dwell in its fishy midst. We cast our lines skyward, in hopes of landing the elusive holy mackerel.
for St. Antonym
Global warming has penetrated the snow globe. Turn it over and you get freezing rain, drip drip drip drip. Set it down and the sun comes out, drop drop drop. An occasional clatter when some branch lets go. The snowman in the front yard of the psychiatric hospital loses his carrot and his sticks and shrinks into an icy lingam. In place of a carol, the music box plays Mozart under Glass: incessant tinkling. Hammers wielded by a sweatshop full of elves.
Qarrtsiluni is now accepting submissions for a new theme, education. Meanwhile, however, those short shorts of summer will keep appearing through the end of August.
It’s the last two weeks before the students return with their immaculate book bags and their forty thousand sets of genitals. Workers from the Office of Physical Plant are busy trimming and chipping, watering, applying poison and fertilizer. The chains that line the walks must be re-hung from fancy new black metal hitching posts. Fresh-looking bark mulch must be trucked in to cover up the scandal of decay. Earthworms are coming out of the ground, and cicadas are tumbling from the treetops in mid-buzz. Their small bodies stiffen with every inch of sidewalk they attempt to traverse.
Click on photos for larger versions
It doesn’t seem right that such great & graceful wings should bear such a small & ugly head. From underneath, at least, you can’t see its nakedness, backlit as it is by the far more naked sun.
If it walks like a duck, but leaves purple footprints, what then?
*
“My wish,” said the shipwrecked man to the genie, “is for a lifetime’s supply of lamps!”
*
The spider gazes at the dried basswood fruits and & is possessed by an Idea. She feels it stirring in her lower abdomen.
*
Without the constraints of tradition, there would be no culture, no art, no beauty! Or so we like to imagine, shaking our little green bells.
*
Only a savage would dance for no reason, making up new moves with every step.
I went for a walk yesterday morning along the stream
I saw shadows & reflections mingling in the same pool
the reflections too mingled images & shadows
a mayfly dipped her ovipositor in the pool & a fern began to twist
& I looked down & saw my own body turned into a screen for the shadows of reflections
a flickering black-&-white feature
then the sun moved on
this is that stream you can’t step into twice
in fact you can never step out
outlines dissolve in the current
words fail
the vision blurs
Last Friday, I accompanied my brother on a quest for the Appalachian tiger beetle (Cicindela ancocisconensis), which inhabits sandy river banks of wilderness-quality creeks and rivers, and is thus rare throughout its range, though locally common. We went to Penn’s Creek, a world-famous trout stream that winds through the Seven Mountains north of State College, Pennsylvania. It’s one of the few places in the state where C. ancocisconensis has been collected. We found one beetle within the first half-hour of searching, but it eluded Steve’s insect net. We spent the next hour and a half clambering over slippery rocks and around huge hemlock trees to search the few, small beaches in the Penn’s Creek canyon in the vicinity of Poe Paddy State Park.
While Steve concentrated on his quarry, I found myself composing riddles in my head about everything I saw. I don’t think these are especially difficult. I’ll post the answers tomorrow in the form of an update to this post Answers are at the end of the post.
*
A dark waterfall of fur
slipping down the rocks at
the river’s edge, soft yoke
no neck will ever wear.
*
Though green, I am no plant.
Two kingdoms live in me, but no ruler.
I’m a colonist of places
where nothing else can survive.
*
Death comes to the hemlock trees
in grayish white clots the size of pinheads.
*
We combed the banks of a rocky peninsula formed by a sinuous loop of the creek. The water was muddy from the rains the day before, and few fishermen were willing to try their luck in it, so we had the creek mostly to ourselves. The flowering dogwood appeared especially brilliant against the dark hemlocks, and wild geraniums, Virginia bluebells and white wood anemones bloomed among the rocks. Unfortunately, I knew we didn’t have the time or the proper vehicle to drive the rough road up to the view of the gorge, which is quite spectacular.
*
I have lived for two years, but this
is my first full day. I have a mouth,
but no stomach. I will die before dark.
*
Condemned to live outside
my true element, I curl up & hide
until the urge to hunt stretches me
to my full length, & I curve
into the current like an arrow
crossed with a bow.
*
The roof of one large fishing camp at Poe Paddy makes room for a tree in a manner reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece Fallingwater.
Temporary fishing camps were rising on poles at the state park campground, as well. Solemn-faced men got in and out of pickup trucks, or stood around in small knots by the shore, staring at the turbid water.
*
Rubber udders, two long nipples each,
for the cow called Land to offer its milk of men to the creek.
*
Nymph on a silk leash,
creature of knots,
deadly desire given angelic form.
*
Grain routed through fire, water & air
lands at last on ice: two temporary containers for light
resting in a third, which was once a handful of sand
but now offers smooth resistance to the fingers
& culminates in a screw where lip meets lip.
*
At last, Steve caught a single specimen in the front yard of the fishing camp pictured above, near where we parked. One of the owners of the camp, who was relaxing on a bench by the water, gave us permission to collect the beetle. Some better pictures of C. ancocisconensis are here. And by the way, in case you’re wondering about the Latin, Steve told me its intended meaning is a complete mystery.
__________
Answers: a wild mink; a green lichen (see here for factoids about lichens); hemlock woolly adelgid; mayfly (see “Ephemeral” at Chronicles from Hurricane Country); northern water snake; hip waders; an angler’s fly; whiskey in a jar (what the old fellow at the fishing camp appeared to be drinking)
The LPN believes in being firm. Her daughter is five, and she doesn’t allow her to meet her gaze; she always stares back until the daughter looks away. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, she likes to say.
*
The woman in the next bed
moans all night: Help me, help me,
somebody, nurse.
The nurse steals in on stockinged feet.
*
When her four-year-old son was an infant, she would sit on him, straddling his tiny torso while her husband changed the diaper. They’re never too young to learn to lie still, she said.
*
In the woods behind the hospital,
trilliums bob in the sun, a white mirage.
The moss cracks open from lack of rain.
*
The 88-year-old great-grandmother looks on with an aching heart. Her mild suggestions carry little weight with her daughter or son-in-law, with her grandson or his wife the nurse. “They all talk to me like a child,” she tells us. “You’re the first people I’ve had an adult conversation with in months.”
*
Those clouds could be anything:
dogwood, hawthorn,
some wild cherry wrapped in caterpillar webs.
*
Expected to look after her great-grandchildren half the week, she tries to make them understand that love need not be accompanied by threats or a smothering embrace. When the four-year-old kicks her, much to his outraged surprise, she hits back.
*
On the abandoned farm, a lawn chair
still sits out under the apple tree.
Petals drift down between the slats.
*
Back in Pennsylvania for a rare visit, she apologizes for not doing a better job of staying in touch. “I’ve been so exhausted. I can’t remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep.”
*
Toothwort,
spleenwort,
bleeding-heart,
hepatica:
we might fall forever if not
for that net of roots.