Sun shines through the snow squall
& the two panes of glass
in my back door.
I miss you. My knees are cold,
& make little popping noises
when I climb the stairs.
__________
Another one for the Read Write Poem challenge.
Haiku
Hey — it’s sleeting,
& the wind smells of cow manure.
Goodnight, moon.
Test
Plagued by insomnia, I pad downstairs & grab a book at random in the dark. I soon find myself reading about Arctic terns, which fly 22,000 miles each year, circling from one end of the earth to the other so they can spend their lives in continual daylight — an endless frigid summer. They are, the book says, delicate-looking black & white birds with bright red feet & beaks, and very high-strung: they assault anyone or anything that approaches the little hollows in the permafrost where they make their nests. The male & female take turns incubating the eggs, & when the off-duty bird returns, it brings its mate the gift of a small fish.
*
I’ve been thinking about those porcupines of the ocean, the sea urchins. Their transparent, shell-less eggs have been featured in textbooks of developmental biology for over a hundred years, & Aristotle himself first drew attention to the simplicity of their digestive systems with their five hollow teeth and five-chambered stomachs.
Purple sea urchins, I learned recently, use their spines to excavate hollows in solid rock, & so anchor themselves against the surf. The spines attach to ball-and-socket joints, & can be used also for defense or locomotion. The purple sea urchin genome was sequenced just last November, & 70 percent of its genes were discovered to have a human counterpart.
Among my collection of miscellaneous natural objects is a sea urchin’s flying saucer-shaped shell, or test, which I found washed up on a beach when I was a kid. Thirty years later, it still smells faintly of the ocean.
*
Can there be anything lonelier than a fourth-quarter moon, which loses its shine so long before it sets? There it is in mid-morning, like a half-eaten midnight snack of milk & cookies. Imagine trying to describe moonlight to someone who has never experienced anything but day.
__________
Written in response to a ReadWritePoem challenge. (UPDATE) Links to other responses are here.
Bell Pepper
Something has drilled a tiny hole
right above the base of the bell pepper.
I try to picture what it must’ve been like
to inhabit that green cathedral space as it expanded
& its single cloud grew ponderous with seeds.
Imagine the light & the sliding shadows of leaves
shaped like enormous beetles.
Imagine an orange sunset, in the absence of a horizon,
starting from random spots
that slowly spread across the vegetable sky,
deepening week by week into fire-engine red.
There is no heart like this, so roomy, so full of sugar.
If it is a bell, it’s much too good at absorbing
every kind of blow — or else
its tone is too high-pitched
to be heard by anything larger than the head of pin.
__________
Written for the prompt #2 at Read Write Poem. The other responses (mostly food poems) are here.
Windshield frost
We crawled cautiously, semi-sighted, across junctions and around corners until, on the slope by the park, we turned head on toward the sun. That first lick of low light was enough to temper the ice which now slid softly sideways under the rhythm of the blades.
The first touch of sun
and the windshield frost is gone —
so clear a view!
*
Light Verse for a Heavy Universe
Most of the numbers in the world are wrong and always have been. Government agencies ceaselessly and shamelessly revise their figures. Scientists and engineers “refine” theirs. Economists “massage” their data and finally turn the charts upside-down or sideways to make the numbers match reality.
Counting to 10 can help prevent a row —
is having a number better than having a cow?
Our days are numbered, we think, but we don’t know how.
Clocks make us forget that every moment is now.
*
Twitter [note on login page, 11/16]
You’ll be able to access Twitter again in just a second. We’re just shuffling a few things around. Just hang tight… [emphasis added]
Just
an adjustment, but so un-
just!
*
I didn’t write today. I cleaned.
Last week sucked mightily.
I have the next three days off.
This is not a poem. This is how my brain is working now.
I want D to be happy. I want Moby to be happy.
Moby is easier. He got to lie in the sun on a curl of red wool today.
This is not a poem.
This is how my brain is working now.
I want D to be happy.
*
Here’s the Cordelia resident snowy egret, which perches on pens and pools and knows how to get free food…
At feeding time
for the de-oiled waterfowl,
a snowy egret.
*
I am twenty, walking home from work in Billings. A man in a car calls me over to ask directions. When I get to the car, I see that he is exposed, masturbating. I turn away, thinking this did not happen. I hear the words: this did not happen. I even see the words pass by my eyes, like the ticker on the bottom of the CNN screen (cable news, which hasn’t yet been invented): THIS … DID … NOT … HAPPEN.
Penis in hand,
he calls a woman over
to ask directions.
*
…and, of course, button-eyed frogs. I say of course, because, in truth, my sister is a frog phobic (and I will leave it to you to find out the correct Greek-rooted word for that), and as so often happens with phobias, the object has become something of a motif in her life and work!
Buttons for eyes
on the bestiary quilt —
you’ll find them at night.
*
{ Never Neutral }
I spend long hours staring at the computer. Autism redefined. Suddenly, an eyelid starts to twitch, then the biceps, or the triceps sometimes, starts to pulse, like a heart, like a rabbit inside a magician’s hat, like saying, take me out of here, “remember me”. The ghost is not in the machine, but in the body enslaved by the machine.
There on the glass
when the monitor goes dark,
my own sad face.
Some good news, ending in cat vomit
That new anthology of poet-bloggers I mentioned two weeks ago is out, from the new, Montreal-based Phoenicia Publishing.
Writers and artists have always formed groups for mutual support, commentary, and encouragement, sometimes collaborating on public projects from group shows to hand-printed literary magazines. But while one tends to think of local writers hanging out in Paris cafés in the 1930s, or on the lower East side of New York in the 1950s, how does that desire for communication and creative inspiration translate into today’s online world?
You can browse the Table of Contents and read sample poems (including two of mine that you might recognize) at the Phoenicia site, then follow the link to order a copy or two. It’s a beautifully designed book, and should make a classy (and very affordable) Christmas, Hanukkah, or Solstice present.
UPDATE: Rachel Barenblat, one of the two co-editors, does a much better job of describing the book.
*
I’m guest-blogging at Blogging Blog (say that three times fast!) on Blogs as a medium for online literary magazines: lessons from qarrtsiluni. And yes, I committed what I always thought was a cardinal sin for bloggers: using a colon in a title. Ack!
*
Last night, I got some very exciting news from a blogging friend of mine, the multi-talented Natalie d’Arbeloff (also included in the aforementioned anthology, by the way) whose Blaugustine I have linked to so many times. Natalie was one of six finalists in a huge competition sponsored by the Guardian newspaper to win the right to edit their women’s pages for a week. Natalie didn’t learn until she attended the party last night that she had won! Be sure to stop by (November 8 entry – no permalink) and congratulate her.
*
If I were serious about getting more readers and links for Via Negativa, I guess I’d be leaving these comment haiku far and wide. But that’s not the point of the exercise; I simply want to respond more thoughtfully to the blogs I already read. Sometimes I can’t think of a haiku, but the effort translates into a more substantial prose comment than I might’ve come up with otherwise. And lots of times, still, I nod in silent appreciation and move on.
stained glass of
rusty red and yellow
birch leaves on wet skylight
Leaves on wet skylight:
this must be what a snail sees
from inside its shell.
*
Dr. Omed
In this series of nude photographs of the frankly obese-and-proud-of-it women of the Big Burlesque and Big Bottom Revue, he fights the good fight against the ‘tyranny of slenderness.’
The yin-yang tattoo
on the fat woman’s back has grown
as big as an apple.
*
cold walk in the dark
dog in circle of flashlight
home a distant light
First snowfall melts
on contact with the ground. Only
the fallen leaves turn white.
*
It’s always been difficult to describe the colour of the carpet that runs along the corridor, up the stairs and along the upper corridor of this house. Not mustard, not buttercup. Sunrise? no. Baby-shit comes close. But now, thanks to Cat, I know the exact hue. It is cat-sick-bile coloured.
A mixed blessing:
the color of the cat’s vomit
matches the carpet.
Scarab
Hard
& round
& shiny as
a sex toy,
studded collar
biting into
the dirt,
the translucent
hum of
his wings
folded away,
the six-
legged god
plods backwards,
wheeling his
little world
of shit.
False spring
So there are lilacs blooming in the dooryard, and it is November.
I also saw peaches, pears and hickories in bloom on the way home from Gallatin the other day.
Trees blossoming
even as their leaves turn yellow:
it hurts to look.
*
And this is a picture of my left big toe, getting over familiar with a sea anemone. Mostly because I just posted this today on our family blog, where the subject of feet has come up, and it was all shrunk and ready to go. (The photo, not my foot).
Toe to tentacle
with a sea anemone,
what nacreous nails!
*
The first morning after arriving, we found many Pelicans gathered on the wharf in a section of the harbour. By the next morning, the numbers had multiplied to the point that almost every square foot of wharf was occupied by these birds.
Pelicans on the wharf
waiting out the storm all face
the same direction.
*
Beyond the glass, two white-tails head downstream;
one walks the north bank, the other the south.
Dead deer in the creek:
a vulture rises from its perch
between the antlers.
*
The ‘cells’ were my favourites: intricate, enclosing, troubling dolls’ houses for grown-ups where I could have lingered, playing mind-games, for hours.
In the bush by my door
it’s the second winter now
for that cocoon.
__________
Oddly enough, a WordPress “child” category can only have a single parent. So I guess I’ll place this new category for comment haiku under Poems & poem-like things, though it could just as easily go under Blogs and blogging.
New wrinkles
Haiku comment week continues after a two-day pause. Actually, I might make have made this a permanent part of my blogging, and retire have retired the Smorgasblog. We’ll see.
My theory of why haiku in English work: it’s the three lines, and the fact that the middle one usually has one more stress than the other two. That, and the lack of direct metaphor — that reticence. The spaces at the end of each line prepare us for the space afterwards, which is needed to do the extra work that haiku require of a reader, if they’re any good (and some of mine aren’t, I realize).
*
[photo]
Slipping through a crack
in the shed wall, the sun finds
the one round thing.
*
Light Verse for a Heavy Universe
What isn’t wrinkled? Plastic. Glass. Chrome.
Unless, through a microscope, you discover
the scandalous truth.
A verse must be light
to traverse the hidden depths
in every surface.
*
Tonight, the priest on his right listened, raised his eyebrows, smiled, and didn’t say anything; B. smiled a bit more broadly, enjoying ruffling the feathers. The question is actually timely: while traditional Catholic and Anglican parishes all the province are emptying, groups of young people are forming their own house churches, sharing bread and fellowship, prayer, meditation, and community.
Steady presences:
a friend, a journal, the smile
of a silent priest.
*
Blaugustine (Nov. 2)
The transition from canvas to camera to computer to website to internet doesn’t allow for accurate reproduction. Never mind, at least you can follow the changes. I don’t know if any more apples are going to appear.
Even the vase
on the windowsill wants
to be an apple.
*
Tucker and I walked over to Dogbane Corner, one of my favorite neglected patches of weedy vegetation. The dogbane pods have burst and I took these shots.
On the weedy lot
near the new jail, dogbane seeds
loosen in the wind.
*
The House & other Arctic musings
What? One hundred and thirty-seven Nunavut bloggers?
Bloggers vanish
in the long Nunavut winter
as their fingers go numb.
*
I also learned, to my great surprise, that ‘marraskuu’, the Finnish name for this month, means ‘month of the dead’. But wait, it may not be like Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead as celebrated in Mexico. It’s thought to come from the earth being ‘martaana’ or in a state of death.
All Souls Day:
the dead hortensia speaks
in a thin whisper.
*
Red-legged partridges are not native to the Americas. This one obviously belongs to someone. We tried to catch it but it flew onto the roof. If it isn’t careful, it’s going to belong to the red-tailed hawk that’s been flying around all day, calling…
Christmas already?
A red-legged partridge on the roof,
a red-tailed hawk.
Shine or shimmer?
Haiku comment week continues. Today’s relatively small haul of half-baked haiku shows what happens when I prioritize my own blogging and going for a walk instead. Even without the extra effort to write haiku, it’s always hard to know how to balance writing with reading, commenting, and linking.
How can I separate
from the insidious desires
of the temporary self, that voicewhich whispers “today I want
warmer socks and a box of truffles
and praise from the people around me
and an easy shortcut
to everything I don’t yet know?”
It’s shine or shimmer,
sunspots on the camera lens
or my own shadow.
*
There are pomegranates in the refrigerator, untouched, and persimmons ripening on the tree. On Sunday a boisterous dog covered my shins in mud. She paid close attention to me in a way instantly familiar and wrenching…
Left in the fridge,
slowly turning sweet —
pomegranates.
*
We forgot to bring the Sibley’s Bird Guide with us (that and a bunch of other important things like the telephone, the modem, the cat’s kibble), so the new birds we are seeing in the creek are unknown to us. It’s like the good old days, when we just looked and couldn’t identify anything.
I like a café
where nobody knows my name:
I can eavesdrop.
*
Most important is the sea and a beach empty of people. Shorebirds wheel in the far distance trailing their shadows along the shoreline. The haze at the horizon suggests gannets or scoters tumbling into themselves above the breakers.
Shadows on the surf,
reflections on the wet sand:
black skimmers.
*
White stands for purity.
Maybe that is not appropriate.
Use a different color.
I myself would not use a plaid cloth.
The red pillow case
I use for an altar cloth
never shows the dust.