The first thimble was the tanned hide
of an enemy’s thumb. Whisky
had yet to be invented, but
needles were employed as lances
in desperate finger-to-finger combat.
Battlefields were so numerous,
they were stacked into other battlefields
like Russian dolls. Soon, brass
was pressed into use, & one armorer
began dimpling the surface
to ward off smallpox.
Prostitutes made their Johns (then
still called Jacks) wear thimbles
on every finger, because who knew
where those hands had been?
Meanwhile they were measuring ale
with the horns of bulls. Guts
were spilling from unprotected abdomens.
If you didn’t want a sorceror’s tongue,
you couldn’t stare open-mouthed
at the pock-marked moon.
Hyperphagia
There’s a votive candle with a picture of Santa Barbara
in her teal colored robe flickering in the middle
of our table, and a faded prayer in Spanish on the other
side of the glass. There are swirls of gold and orange
on the chalkboard over the bar, wreathing the names
of the evening’s offer of cervezas: Dos Equis, Modelo,
Corona, Tecate. Between bursts of music, the clatter
of silverware, the steady hum and static of voices.
We lick the last of the guacamole off the appetizer
plate, but we barely make a dent in the pastel
and sweet corn tamales. Is the waitress disappointed?
She brings three plastic take-out boxes and sweeps up the tab.
It’s the middle of the week and almost October; the dark
comes earlier. Somewhere a train is always pulling away.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The names of underwings
For some reason, the names of many moths in the genus Catocala have bizarrely soap-operatic names. Here are some of my favorites, as encountered in the wonderful new Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie:
- The Penitent (Catocala piatrix)
- The Betrothed (Catocala innubens)
- The Old Maid (Catocala badia coelebs)
- Obscure Underwing (Catocala obscura)
- Widow Underwing (Catocala viuda)
- Tearful Underwing (Catocala lacrymosa)
- Oldwife Underwing (Catocala Paleogama)
- Youthful Underwing (Catocala subnata)
- Sad Underwing (Catocala maestosa)
- The Bride (Catocala neogama)
- Once-Married Underwing (Catocala unijuga)
- Mother Underwing (Catocala parta)
- Darling Underwing (Catocala cara)
- The Sweetheart (Catocala amatrix)
- Magdalen Underwing (Catocala illecta)
- Sordid Underwing (Catocala sordida)
- Wonderful Underwing (Catocala mira)
- Charming Underwing (Catocala blandula)
- Connubial Underwing (Catocala connubialis)
- Girlfriend Underwing (Catocala amica)
- The Little Nymph (Catocala micronympha)
I suppose the way these moths lift their forewings to reveal bright pink-, red- and orange-striped hindwings suggested something feminine, like a petticoat, to the lepidopterists who named them.
I’m a little embarassed to admit however that many of the underwings look pretty much alike to me, even with the help of a field guide, so I’m not entirely sure which species is pictured above. (Maybe the Sweetheart?) This is the one I saw back on September 2, and my mention of some of these names prompted Luisa to incorporate them into her poem for the day, “Telenovela” (which is Spanish for “soap opera”).
Living at peace
Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for the day of our deaths. Today we wear white, like our burial shrouds. (Some wear a white robe called a kittel, in which they will someday be buried.) Today we abstain from food and drink; the dead need neither. And today we say the vidui, the confessional prayers, as we will say on our deathbeds. As Rabbi Shef Gold has written, “For the whole day of Yom Kippur, we act as if it is our last day, our only day to face the Truth, forgive ourselves and each other, remember who we are and why we were born.”
Today is our chance to release all the karmic baggage we haven’t managed to let go in the last year. To set ourselves, and everyone we know, free. Not so that we can die at peace — but so that we can live at peace, with ourselves and with one another.
Computer Chip
This is our tilled ground, our garden of forking paths. I picture its millions of transistors blinking, its mono-crystal silicon wafers pulsing as information courses like sap through the photolithographic veins, parsed by logic gates, blended by multiplexers. I know this isn’t quite what happens, but I keep trying to imagine it: how roots link up with roots & what leaps between them. How layers thinner than paper overlap like pages in a book that writes & re-writes itself, or like the sedimentary crust of a living planet. I know it’s not alive, that it is closer to a map than a landscape, & that in trying to re-purpose old templates I fall far short. But something about its stark dualism — the closed 1, the open 0 — & all it can gather in fills me with awe. The integrated circuit is my shepherd. I shall not want.
Pledge
My dear, she texted late last night, if you can spare me something, I need it for food, for medicine, for things in the everyday. How could I not respond? You cannot say, But I just sent you something less than two weeks ago. Mother, sometimes I feel the days slip like water through my fingers. And then the cycle of worry rotates— paddle wheel, boat going nowhere, ferry stuck between the shores of departure and arrival, while sun-worshippers zip by in motorized rubber boats. Putting away books on the shelf, I came across a friend’s inscription in a journal, given years ago. She wrote, Looking forward to our forties, when we will have made it; to our fifties, when we’re settled, and to our sixties, when we will look back at our lives to celebrate the harvest. I set it back and ponder this assurance: something I have never really had in such pure and unadulterated form. I am the queen of making-do, I’d joked back. I’ve saved all manner of odds and ends for use on a rainy day. Wrapping paper, shampoo samples, gift bottles of wine. But there is no contentment in these miserly economies, mother. I bite into bread, or fruit, or cheese, and some part of me shrivels with the shame of being unable to share these morsels with you.
In response to cold mountain (60).
Baby Carrots
As if carrots were yeast cells,
reproducing through budding:
the baby an adorably rounded
chip off the old block.
This triumph of marketing
has in fact reversed a trend
toward shorter carrots, because
of course the long ones can yield
as many as four “babies” each.
But are they infantile enough
to compete with junk food?
One ad psychologist recommends
dusting them with powder —
not Johnson & Johnson but
something orange, like Cheetos.
Carrot breeders lament
that selecting for succulence
makes them brittle as glass.
They can crunch in the mouth
but they mustn’t shatter —
they’re not bombs.
And a faint trace of bitterness
must remain, or the consumer
no longer perceives them
as true carrots. Authenticity is key,
along with air-tight packaging.
I struggle to open a bag, & find
I’m all thumbs.
Sources: “Digging the baby carrot” and “Baby carrots take on junk food with hip marketing campaign.”
Triptych
If I were a leaf, a thorn, a sapling bent by wind— And you do but don’t believe, when I tell you how at seventeen, I stood up in the darkened cinema (one of two in my hometown); the usher in the shabby cardigan shone his flashlight up and down the aisles, calling my name because my father had phoned the manager to ask that I be ordered home.
*
If I were a knot, a burr on the surface of wood— You would not say so often, Weep then bear up; crumple then cease, endure, transmute. Transmute, as the heart of darkest wood yields coils that might still shine, after the axe— Onyx or anthracite, or something more domestic: yes, sorghum dripping from a spoon.
*
If I were fairer or less coarse, less complicated than a modular plot— But I am always the immigrant, wed to a handful of exit visas. Spring is a relief after the two-plot designs of rain and summer, rain and heat. Of the parched heart, a poet once wrote: come upon me with a shower of mercy. Sometimes I think spring is kinder by far than love.
*
In response to cold mountain (59).
Teju Cole on Instagram
But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.
Echo
Yes, I still remember how the old market was laid out:
fruit, rice and dried fish, the row of coffee vendors,
the vegetable sellers; and beyond, the butchers
and the fishmongers. At the end of narrow corridors
slick with scales and fish guts, the women who packed
salt expertly into paper cones— such tiny fossils
of minerals and tears. And the boys that pulled
wobbly wooden carts filled with mountain produce
called out warnings up and down the hilly streets.
Most everyone I used to know has gone ahead—
gone on to gold, to gated subdivisions, early
retirement, presumably to everything they ever
wanted. And under this half-biscuit of a moon,
I stand, head tilted, still listening for the slow
stutter of crickets calling from the garden.
In response to Via Negativa: Fall.