Personal/Political – Page 23

February 3, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Little Sadie

Parental Advisory label PARENTAL ADVISORY: Contains explicit lyrics. Granted, explicitness is generally considered to be one of the main features of good writing. But this is America, where most people prefer sugar-coated platitudes, perception management, and bald-faced lies. What we really mean to say is, this contains lyrics describing things that no impressionable young mind would have any idea about, were it not for music such as this. Also, please be advised that the failure to expose your child to at least 20 hours of Mozart per week, instead of the depraved noise made by low-life degenerates and colored people, is now treated as a form of child abuse in some states.

January 31, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Second Life, weather magic, and other unlikely things

Just like its mythological namesake, this January had two faces. It started out warm, on the heels of a virtually snow-free December. Throughout the northeast, lakes and ponds remained unfrozen, temperatures soared into the high 50s on a few days, and we thought that winter would never come. But then, just past the middle of the month, the mercury fell. Those of us who care about forest health cheered — at last, a good cold snap to knock back some of the more virulent insect pests! And we started getting snow: a half-inch one day, two inches a couple days later, and with just one day above freezing, much of it is still on the ground.

The cold air is great for walking in — the dryness is easier on the lungs. “It’s just like hiking in Arizona!” my mother exults.

In the woods, the rhododendron leaves curl up, turning one, uniform face toward the frigid air.

When the temperature drops below 35F, rhododendron leaves begin to cup and curl at the edges. At 25F, the leaves have curled so tight that half the leaf surface has disappeared and the leaves droop. When temperatures hit the teens, leaves shrivel even tighter, turn brownish-green and dangle like stiff string beans. This response to temperature changes is a rhododendron’s method of preventing loss of moisture through the leaves.

The upper side of a rhododendron leaf is leathery. The bottom side is dappled with tiny air valves that control the flow of air in and out of a leaf. Cold air contains less moisture than warm air. So when low temperatures and high winds arrive, the leaf valves close. By looking out a window on a winter day, one can determine roughly how cold it is by the degree the rhododendron leaves have curled and drooped. When temperatures rise, the leaves open again.

The species in question here is Rhododendron maximum, which grows throughout the eastern U.S. in the colder, damper parts of the forest, often along streams under hemlock cover, or on north-facing slopes. This is because its leaves are sensitive to sun-scald, unlike its cousin mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), which, though also evergreen, does not curl its leaves in the cold.

The Cherokee used to use rhododendron leaves in weather magic. They would “throw clumps of leaves into a fire and dance around it to bring cold weather,” according to this compendium. They also made rhododendron-leaf decoctions for external and internal use against headaches, heart trouble, and other aches and pains, and carved the wood into pipes and spoons. I imagine some still do.

The day before yesterday, I found coyote tracks in the woods above my house, about a hundred feet from my front porch. There was a skim of snow in the tracks, so I knew when the tracks had been made: around midnight, just before the snow stopped. I was inside reading blogs at the time.

That evening, when I was having supper with my parents, the subject of Second Life came up. I mentioned reading that Sweden was establishing the first official embassy in the cyber world. Dad had been reading about Second Life in the business press, and we began talking about virtual real estate, and how you can get people to buy anything if you can just figure out a way to stake a claim.

Mom was baffled. “What? WHAT? That doesn’t make sense!” It really bothered her that people would devote so much time and energy to creating a simulated world when the real world is so little known and appreciated. We agreed that it might be more interesting if the game’s creators had attempted to set up some kind of rudimentary ecosystem, with real ecological costs to any major disruption or development – a kind of Biosphere 3. Right now, apparently, the “place” has few non-human inhabitants, and ecosystem creation is left up to the owner-gods of autonomous parcels of Second Life real estate, such as Svarga, or the new Terminous.

But apparently ecosystem creation was part of the original plan. The CEO of the parent company, Linden Lab, said in a recent interview that

We were very interested in simulating things like physics and weather as a starting point, with the goal of creating enormous complexity that would be very beautiful. We used to imagine that SL, or parts of it, could become vast forests, full of little evolving plants made of code, and you could wander in that forest and find things that no one else had ever seen. What a thought! Builds like Svarga are going exactly in that direction now. I can’t wait to be able to walk in those forests.

I’m of two minds about Second Life. It does seem to have some real-world utility as a space for people to share their artworks, perform original music, or grill their congressional representatives. I’ve always been interested in communal creation (and community creation). But at this point, Second Life sounds more like a shopping mall than a true town square. Its owners could pull the plug at any time, and they are under no obligation to tolerate dissent. And let’s remember: building those artificial forests does have real-world ecological costs in terms of the energy needed to build and power computers and computer networks. The wood-based economy of the high Middle Ages destroyed Europe’s forests in order to build (among other things) cathedrals, those timeless evocations of forest space in glass and stone.

Of course, what’s really caught the media’s attention is the amount of commercial activity that goes on now in Second Life. Real U.S. dollars (converted into an artificial currency) are being spent there… which means that SL’s ecological footprint is growing. Corporations are eagerly buying up advertizing space, and some long-time participants are beginning to complain that there’s less and less to distinguish it from the real world they’re trying to escape.

But let’s not be too hard on the Second Life enthusiasts. It seems to me that people who long to fully inhabit a virtual world are little different from those who regard heaven, or some spiritual plane, as their true home, and their earthly bodies as temporary houses for an immortal soul. (It’s not for nothing that we call our online visual counterparts “avatars”!) I’ve read exactly one cyberpunk novel — William Gibson’s Neuromancer — and was repelled by its vision of an all-encompassing cyberspace. But who among us doesn’t live in a fantasy world to some extent? Why else do we enjoy novels?

The anthropological and paleontological evidence strongly suggests that humans are, at root, gatherer-hunters who evolved in seasonally nomadic, small-band societies. As a result, our sense of home ground is fluid and highly adaptable. Like migratory birds, we have a strong homing instinct precisely because we are prone to wandering. And we are not just wayfarers but way-makers, always trying to convert routes into destinations and the Way into something that can be spoken about. Part of us longs to travel; the other part longs to nest. While some mark territory, others are content just to explore.

Either way, home is a circle of stones with a fire in the middle. If you sit facing the fire too long, your back gets cold and you turn as two-sided as Janus.

So get up and dance!

January 11, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Drops of black profoundness

I first encountered Dsida Jeno’s “Poem of Darkness” on my friend rr’s blog frizzyLogic. Like rr — who, at our bloggers’ confab in Montreal last spring, turned out to have some rather strong notions about what constitutes a proper cup of coffee — I love the central image of the poem:

But tell me: have you ever let
a snow-white sugar-cube soak up
dark liquid, dipped in the bitter night
of coffee in its cup?
Or watched how the dense liquid,
so surely, so insidiously,
will seep up through the white cube’s
pure, crystalline body?
Just so the night seeps into you,
slowly rising, the smells
of night and of the grave all through
your veins, fibres, cells,
until one dank brown evening,
so steeped in it, you melt and sink –
to sweeten, for some unknown god,
his dark and bitter drink.

This morning, quite by chance, I’ve discovered three more creative efforts inspired by coffee. Let me present them in the reverse order of their discovery.

First, a bit of music. What ganja is to reggae and alcohol to the blues, coffee is to speed- or death metal (sometimes also called, tellingly, black metal). Here’s a part-American, part-Scandanavian band existing somewhere on the cusp between fact and fiction called Dethclok, with their tender tribute to Columbian Supremo:

According to the Wikipedia, durning Dethclok’s performance of this song at a charity show, as a gimmick, “several searing hot coffee and cream pitchers [were] … poured on the crowd, melting their skin off.”

Well, frankly, that’s what you get if you don’t drink shade-grown, organic, fair trade coffee. Coffee doesn’t have to kill.

In fact, it turns out there’s now an entire blog — and a pretty good one — devoted to Coffee and Conservation. The author describes him/herself as a Michigan ornithologist and coffee drinker. The most useful feature of the blog for casual consumers is its reviews of individual shade-grown coffees, many of them also organic and fair trade certified. And from the latest post I learned this rather startling news:

[A recent scientific paper] details 103 species in the genus Coffea: 41 species in Africa, 59 in Madagascar, and three in the Mascarene Islands; no naturally-occurring Coffea species are found outside of these three areas, and no species is shared between the three areas.

While most of the paper is of interest only to botanists, one aspect is quite striking. Over 70% of coffee species can be categorized as threatened using World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List definitions:

14 species (13.6%) are Critically Endangered,

35 species (33.9%) are Endangered, and

23 species (24.2%) are Vulnerable.

An additional 13 species (13.7%) are Near Threatened.

This has me bouncing off the walls with alarm. It’s not just jaguars and mot-mots that are in trouble when cloud forest habitat is destroyed to make way for (among other things) coffee plantations. Throughout Africa and Madagascar, wild coffee itself is at risk. I guess this must be what Dethclok had in mind with the final line of their ditty: “Coffee kills coffee.” SAVE THE COFFEE!

Whew. Must calm down. Maybe it’s time to re-read a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by the Scottish poet Robin Fulton. I got a copy of The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems for Christmas, and am working my way slowly through it, reading from back to front in small, daily doses immediately following my morning cup o’ joe. This poem originally appeared in 1962 in a book called (in English) The Half-Finished Heaven.

Espresso

The black coffee they serve outdoors
among tables and chairs gaudy as insects.

Precious distillations
filled with the same strength as Yes and No.

It’s carried out from the gloomy kitchen
and looks into the sun without blinking.

In the daylight a dot of beneficent black
that quickly flows into a pale customer.

It’s like the drops of black profoundness
sometimes gathered up by the soul,

giving a salutary push: Go!
Inspiration to open your eyes.

January 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Monstrous

In my dream I commanded giants, one of them natural, the other a robot. Their literal-minded loyalty terrified me. This is my sister, I said, protect her with your lives. But what could we do when the sky had turned to such implacable concrete? I woke to moonlight & an air so still I could hear a trickle from the measureless caverns under the front lawn.

Immediately after I turn on the computer, a pop-up appears with a minor fanfare of bleats. Symantec Security Alert: A remote computer tried to connect to your computer on a port commonly used by a Trojan horse.

So this is Troy! The armies at the gates are all Greeks, then, & we the barbarians, erecting barriers to foreign investment & the free trade in fictions launched from Olympus.

The make-believe conservative talk-show host asks the bestselling guru, Do you exfoliate?

And something else I heard yesterday that made me chuckle: a British friend describing the output of another bestselling author as monstrous twaddle.

November 7, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Election Day morning: haiku

Election Day morning.
I wake from lascivious dreams
to a screech owl’s quaver.

Election Day morning.
In the bathroom, small toothmarks
all over my soap.

Election Day morning.
The factory whistle seems
to go on forever.

Election Day morning.
Smell of rain, sound of woodpeckers
banging their heads.

Election Day morning.
I make a neat little pile
of my toenail clippings.

Election Day morning.
My wristwatch is now six days
& four hours behind.

Election Day morning.
Gray squirrels forage in the oaks.
The clatter of acorns.

* * *

Feel free to leave your own Election Day haiku in the comment boxes. And read this.

November 6, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Via Negativa endorsement: kiss of death?

The editor of Via Negativa would like to announce his official endorsements of candidates in the 2006 U.S. general election — which, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is tomorrow.

True, Via Negativa is not a political blog. We have few readers in Central Pennsylvania, and quite likely none of them are going to be influenced by what we have to say about politics. At least, we sincerely hope not! But who can resist the temptation to speak of himself in the first person plural and wax self-important on the burning issues of the day? Political endorsements by the editors of small-town newspapers are an endearing and enduring form of all-American entertainment, a chance for the editors to show that despite their paper’s general focus on high school football scores and drunk driving accidents, they are high-minded public citizens with a deep commitment to, you know, voting and stuff. We would like to pay homage to that tradition in our own, small way.

U.S. Senate – None of the Above

Unlike the main-party candidates, None is not an anti-choice candidate who supports capital punishment and the invasion of Iraq and opposes an Iraq withdrawal policy. While we acknowledge that Bob Casey, Junior (D) would make a more tolerable — or at least less embarrassing — senator than Rick Santorum (R), and while we admit to being somewhat influenced by the endorsement of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Sierra Club, of which we are a member, we are annoyed and offended by the cynicism of Democratic Party operatives and their allies in putting forward such an anti-progressive candidate solely because he is likely to ~~kick Santorum’s weasely little ass~~ win.

Please note that None of the Above is a write-in candidate. Voters in Blair County might want to familiarize themselves with the proper procedure for write-ins on the new ESlate voting machines — check out the nifty online demonstration. Alternatively, you could vote for one of the third party whack-jobs whose names will undoubtedly be on the ballot, but we can’t be bothered to research any of them, because let’s face it, none of them stands a chance.

Alert readers may observe at this point that None of the Above doesn’t stand much of a chance, either. However, a vote for None is not a vote for a candidate or a party, but a vote for a principle. Hell, more than a principle: a value. We’re strictly “values voters” here, you know, and we believe in freedom! In particular, we believe that people who want to vote against a given candidate or slate of candidates should have the freedom to do so, without the obnoxious necessity of expressing a positive choice. We support a nationwide re-jiggering of the electoral process to make None of the Above a valid option in every race at every level, from President to Dogcatcher. If None should win over half of the votes cast in a given race, a new election would have to be held with all new candidates. We believe that such a re-jiggering would inspire more people to register and vote, especially in the elusive, toxically cynical 35-and-under demographic. Even better, it would inspire a healthy fear among candidates, who would suddenly be faced with the prospect of losing to Nobody.

U.S. House of Representatives, Pennsylvania 9th District – Tony Barr

We like Tony Barr (D), and not just because he is other-than-Shuster. (We have written about the corruption of the Shuster political dynasty here in the past.) Barr — unlike Casey, for example — has more things going for him as an environmental candidate than simply a pledge not to support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a vague set of promises to advocate for renewable energy. Barr has specific proposals that would actually result in a large and fairly immediate reduction in fossil fuel use if implemented, such as bringing back the goddamned railroads.

Well, that’s not quite how the Barr campaign phrases it:

To protect our environment, our economy, and our national security, we have to change our priorities. We are a petroleum dependent society facing a rapid reduction in petroleum availability. The result will be fuel scarcity and escalating prices, not just for travel, but for goods and services. Petroleum dependence has the potential to destabilize our economy. We can’t continue to depend on cars to get us everywhere.

A critical piece of the solution to our problems is public transportation, and in particular, rebuilding our derelict rail and light rail systems. It currently takes 7Â½ hours to travel by train between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. A modern bullet train could make the journey in about two. Absence of rail transport forces us to use cars, which burn far too much fuel, or fly, with flights becoming costlier and less frequent every day. Trains are cleaner and more fuel efficient than auto-mobiles and airplanes. They emit fewer volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide than cars and planes, and fewer nitrous oxides than cars. Per ton-mile, studies show that a freight train uses between one-third and one-ninth as much fuel as trucks. Trains can move a ton of freight (or passengers) 410 miles on a gallon of diesel. While trucks will always be needed for local delivery, for transport across long distances, we must start moving to rail.

In addition to its other benefits, rebuilding our rail system will provide work for years to come, help to revive Pennsylvania’s steel industry, alleviate city and highway traffic congestion, reduce accidents, and increase the speed of freight delivery. And if we reduce the need to import fuel from other countries, we can increase our national security by disengaging ourselves from regimes with poor human rights practices that give rise to terrorism.

Barr has also staked out shockingly non-vague positions in a number of other areas. He supports: public financing of all campaigns for Federal office; higher taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals; better funding for Head Start and other public education programs; a single-payer, universal health care system; a living wage; better funding for veterans’ hospitals; reproductive rights for women; and the return of paper ballots in every election. You may not agree with all these proposals, but you have to admire the guy for sticking his neck out, especially in such a conservative district. We like the fact that he’s a special education teacher, which suggests that, if elected, he may have a pretty good idea how to get along with his colleagues across the aisle. And finally, Barr is a hunter and gun owner, so we don’t think he’ll try to take our guns away. We like guns.

Pennsylvania Senate District 30 – John Eichelberger

Having just endorsed a progressive Democrat, we feel compelled to endorse a conservative Republican to demonstrate that fairness and balance for which we are legendary. We like Eichelberger in part because he beat the incumbent, Robert C. Jubelirer — the most powerful member of the State Assembly — in last spring’s primary, capitalizing on voter anger at the notorious Pennsylvania pay raise scandal. We find most of Eichelberger’s positions on social issues odious, but as you may have gathered, the environment is our number-one issue. We like the fact that Eichelberger cared enough about the environmental vote to show up at our local Audubon chapter’s annual banquet last spring and bore us nearly to tears with a rambling, poorly delivered, semi-coherent speech. We feel that his lack of charisma and Pillsbury DoughBoy appearance are positive attributes for any candidate for higher office. He does not strike us as a child molester or sociopath.

Eichelberger’s support for the environment as a Blair County Commissioner went beyond rhetoric. I asked an environmental activist friend who is intimately involved with local politics for his assessment of how Eichelberger measures up against his Democratic Party opponent, Greg Morris. He wrote,

I am voting for Eichelberger (R) because he has a great record of
supporting land acquisition at Fort Roberdeau County Park ($800,000 for the purchase of an additional ~150 acres) and he’s been a faithful backer of the Blair County Conservation District. He’s also a critic of the financial incentives given to industrial windplant developers.

Morris (D) specializes in purchasing land that is subject to regulatory hurdles (e.g.: wetlands and steep slopes) cheaply and then developing them. At his fundraising dinner a month ago he boasted that he’s restored more wetlands than any other developer in PA. That’s because he’s destroyed more original wetlands than any other developer in PA.

Morris is personally responsible for devastating hundreds of acres of prime, interior forest habitat along the very ridge we live on (Brush Mountain), as the lead developer of the Logan Town Center, an unneeded shopping center. Further, he brags about his conservative views and says, quite correctly, that he is a Republican in all but name. So it’s not as if he presents liberal voters with much of a choice.

We thought about endorsing None of the Above for this seat, but remembered how pivotal Senator Jubelirer’s support for the Logan Town Center was in over-riding the state Department of Environmental Protection functionaries who wanted to deny Morris the permit to destroy wetlands in that instance. State senators don’t have much influence on the war in Iraq, but they can have a lot of influence on the war against nature. If Eichelberger’s record is any guide, he may be able to stand up against the “property rights” fanatics and work for open space protection and comprehensive land use planning at the state level.

In general, we believe strongly that the Republican Party needs to recover its once-strong support for conservation. It’s extremely unhealthy — literally as well as figuratively — for one party to have a virtual lock on the environment. Democratic politicians have little incentive to do more than make vague promises on most environmental issues as long as they think tree-huggers like us will vote for a Democrat over a Republican no matter what. So that’s why we are going to hold our nose and vote for the Pillsbury DoughBoy tomorrow. We’re sure his campaign will be happy to collect this ringing endorsement, which could well provide that extra little nudge to put him over the top. Then, power and influence will be ours!

That’s all the endorsements we have time or stomach for today. We do, however, have one additional suggestion for voters all across this great, freedom-loving land: take off work tomorrow to vote. In many parts of the country, polling places close long before working people can get to them, so if you want to cast a ballot, you may have little choice but to take the morning off. A general strike might convince the next Congress to make Election Day a national holiday, as it is in virtually every other so-called democracy in the world. Only when that happens will we at Via Negativa feel compelled to take all this voting stuff seriously.

Now, about that last football game…

UPDATE: We have just been informed that the Pennsylvania governorship is also in play this election. Oops, right! We knew that. A football star vs. a sports commentator. Wow. That’s a toughie.

UPDATE #2: We have just been chided in the comments for not endorsing Richard Pombo’s challenger, Jerry McNerney, for the 11th District in California. Richard Pombo is an environmental disaster, a veritable walking Superfund site. If you happen to live in Pombo’s district, and you need help deciding whom to vote for, lord help you — we certainly can’t.

October 27, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Acclimatized

This straw isn’t bad, really, said the scarecrow. I like straw.

At least I’m eliciting strong emotions, said the alarm clock.

I’m taking this opportunity to get in touch with my roots, said the wind-thrown tree.

There’s no greater joy than the feeling of being useful, said the automatic rifle.

Wow, what an intense rush, said the lobster. You hardly notice the heat.

I’m ready for some time apart, said the quarry stone.

October 24, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Mountaintop removal

From ilovemountains.org.

I decided to include this brief documentary here as a kind of quick course for those who might be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of mountaintop removal, since I’ve made reference to it here in the past (most recently in my Campfire tale post). I don’t particularly care for the use of celebrity spokespeople and other outsiders to the region, which to my mind reinforces the notion that mountain people are incapable of speaking up for themselves, but otherwise I think the video gives a good overview of the crisis.

Some additional points to consider:

“Mountaintop removal” is a bit of a euphemism. This form of extreme strip-mining effectively obliterates the entire mountain by taking off its top and then using the “overburden” to fill in the adjacent valleys and ravines (a.k.a. hollows).
The forests will likely take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to recover, if ever. When the narrator refers to a moonscape, that’s not hyperbole. However, more aggressive species of grass will grow, and some local boosters of the coal industry talk about how this will open up the view and allow cattle grazing and the introduction of Rocky Mountain elk for big game hunters to pursue.
The practice of mountaintop removal is tantamount to ecocide. As mentioned in the documentary, the location of these mines in southwestern West Virginia and Kentucky threatens one of the most biodiverse temperate ecosystems in the world: what forest ecologists call the mixed mesophytic forest. This forest is simultaneously under assault by pulpwood companies who are stripping out everything, plowing, and planting red pine monocultures designed for short-rotation tree farming. Many species of salamanders, land snails, and beetles, and even some wildflowers and songbirds, will be threatened with extinction if the combined assault continues too much longer.
Mountaintop removal amounts to an undeclared war against the people and communities of this region. The mining companies display the same kind of callous disregard for life as the European companies that conspired to ship deadly chemical waste to Ivory Coast last month: it’s not that they hate poor people, exactly, they just fail to recognize them as fully human. The documentary shows this pretty well. Like any war, it also divides communities, with many people clamoring for the few, temporary jobs that this form of mining provides, even knowing that laying waste to the land will render it largely uninhabitable for generations to come.
What can you do? Besides helping to spread the word, consider supporting organizations such the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, West Virginia’s premier conservation organization, which has been tireless in its fight against mountaintop removal through every possible legal means. (The Highlands Conservancy is also, incidentally, one of the main reasons why the Monogahela National Forest is in such good shape.) Other worthy groups include Appalachian Voices, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

October 11, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Bystander

“Have you met each other before?”

“No, I don’t think we have,” I lie, seeing the lack of recognition in the other person’s eyes. Why risk embarrassing them by telling the truth?

This happens twice in one evening. It’s a relief, really, to find myself so forgettable.

But when I try to breeze past the chancellor, assuming more of the same, she interrupts her conversation to hail me.

And of course I find that a bit unsettling.

Another awkward moment comes when I am introduced for the second time to someone I have nothing to say to. That’s my fault, not hers: she is given no information about me other than my name, whereas I know one small thing about her, so clearly the onus is on me to initiate a conversation with some pleasant inquiry about her work. Nothing but sheer indolence prevents me from doing so.

But don’t get the wrong impression: I had a lovely evening. Really. The food at the reception was good, the speech beforehand was a tour de force, and it was pleasant to stand around on the periphery of one or more conversations, munching on sweets and basking in the second-hand glow of camaraderie and wit. Earlier in the day, I had been feeling sad for some reason, but the speech was so good and so funny, it put me in a completely different frame of mind.

I noticed one other person not saying much, but she looked awkward about it and left as soon as she could. Which is a pity, really — I could have gone over and talked to her. We’ve known each other for at least two decades. No introduction would have been necessary.

September 29, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The Sycamore

The young veteran — a double
amputee — is still learning how
to pilot a wheelchair. He stops
a few feet from the concrete lip
of the pond, gazing across at
a sycamore shining in the sun.
His eyes travel down the trunk
& into the water, the shadow
going one way, the reflection
another. A carp slides under
the flesh-toned bark. Meanwhile,
his flannel shirt has turned into
a screen for reflected sunlight,
dazzling the mallards crowding
around his chair. He glances
down at the dancing shadows
on his chest, then reaches behind
for a bag of breadcrumbs,
which he sets there where a lap
used to be, in that abyss.