Like holding a telescope to the bones —
the cat’s purr, gurgling a dirge for hours.
Liminal
“Did I say the day was a sea? I may have meant the day is a diffusion and a scattering of trajectories…” ~ Seon Joon
Or an inlet. An inlet might be good. Might be a little enclosure, a leading into or away. Marsh, lagoon, bay, sound. Estuary, tide pool, terrace, shelf, strand. As in, to be stranded for a little while with me, myself, and I might learn to work free of pretense, defense— Tonight, even the youngest girl said, If we’re going out for dinner, can it be someplace where there isn’t a lot of noise? Guinness World Records lists the anechoic test chamber of a lab in Minneapolis as the quietest place in the world. They say, sitting in the dark in its double walls of insulated steel, concrete, and fiberglass acoustic wedges, you’d hear your heartbeats echoing, your organs paddling in their shallow pools: you would become the sound. The longest anyone has sat there is three quarters of an hour, before he begged to be released, became disoriented; I believe it. How many times have I woken at dawn from dread spreading through my chest, loud pounding in my ears, the telephone’s insistent chime? My students, facile with their shiny hoard of new discursive phrases, write of the liminal. I lodge there often, where possibility is its most ambiguous flower.
In response to cold mountain (55).
Death of the Author
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
six whispery notes. Bill Knott.
*
I’m the proud owner of 15 new “homepubs”—homemade publications—from the great contemporary poet Bill Knott, who prints them up and bundles them off along with a limited edition print and an original painting to anyone who orders a painting through his website. Check it out. I find I like the whole concept of home pub, especially now that I have a new batch of homebrew ready to drink (more on that soon).
Ramadan in Istanbul
It’s at night that Ramazan becomes palpable to the nonobservant, and that’s one of the reasons I love it. The whole city becomes as nocturnal as I, by disposition and habit, already am. The streets are lively well past midnight: people stay out late, strolling on the shore, filling sidewalk teahouses in the warm night air. Children are up late too—they don’t fast, but in summer there’s no need to wake for school in the morning, so they’re out and about, walking with their families and playing on the sidewalks. There’s something of a fairground atmosphere: cotton candy and ice-cream and street vendors selling cheap plastic toys. But the gaiety goes hand-in-hand with marks of piety, like the low, continous sounds issuing from the mosques—Qur’an recitation, prayers, ilahi—and the lightbulbs strung between their minarets.
Changes at the Morning Porch
Tinkering with WordPress sites can be a lot of fun, but often doesn’t produce visible differences as far as site visitors are concerned. This morning’s tinkerings with The Morning Porch, however, have brought one highly visible change that I think dramatically improves the reader’s experience: In the “On this date” sidebar widget, I now include the full text of posts from previous years so one can read them without clicking through. Also, I believe the widget will now change in sync with my timezone rather than stay tied to GMT, as it did before.
I should also note the addition of a new site to the “other micropoetry and microessay blogs” section of the Morning Porch blogroll: Northern Light: A Daybook, by the western Massachusetts-based poet Rosemary Starace, author of Requitements.
*
For those of you who are fellow WordPress geeks, here’s what changed behind the scenes and why. When I moved the site to its current location in late 2009 after two years on Tumblr, none of the posts had titles—Tumblr isn’t as insistent on that point as WordPress is. Rather than do the smart thing and start creating titles at that point, manually pasting the first few words and an ellipsis into the title field of each post going forward, I couldn’t bring myself to let the archived posts remain titleless. So I found a nifty plugin designed for a slightly different purpose, Blogger Title Fix, that would automatically substitute a short excerpt for the title field. It worked pretty well, but I had to hack the hell out of the plugin I used to display “on this date” links so that it would link to the date rather than the (nonexistent) titles. Last year, that plugin—A Year Before—got a major update, but when I upgraded, I found it didn’t play nice with Blogger Title Fix, and since its codebase had been substantially rewritten and I am a terrible coder, I couldn’t figure out how to hack it as I had its predecessor. But at some time in the intervening months I must’ve run across another, newer and more general title-adjusting plugin called Auto Post Title and given it a quick try without thoroughly checking out its features, because I found it unactivated among my plugins at The Morning Porch this morning. This time I realized that one of the things it can substitute for a title is the excerpt, so it was just a matter of radically shortening the standard excerpt length with another plugin, Advanced Excerpt, so my titles wouldn’t be the same length as the posts. (I could also do this via a hack to my functions.php file, of course, but in my opinion such things belong in plugins rather than theme files.)
So I was happy to have replaced an old, unupdated plugin with a newer one, which still leaves me dependent on a plugin where I shouldn’t be, but puts off the day when a major change in WordPress core suddenly makes all the post titles disappear. And then I was able to update to the current version of A Year Before, and oddly enough, what it uses for a post excerpt is still the standard—it’s unaffected by the Excerpt Length plugin—so I was able to include the full text of Morning Porch posts as previously mentioned, which I think adds a whole new dimension to the site. Moral: it pays to reexamine one’s plugin configuration on a regular basis. Just because a given setup works doesn’t mean it’s optimal.
Preliminaries
Let us dispense with.
Have you receipts
for my ripened figs?
You took my pleasure,
you skimmed the trees
without so much
as touching down.
I took you for
abundance, unasked-
for sugar, fat in
a time of drought;
in return you pressed
my substance, absently,
into a distant fold—
slip of paper shedding
its metaphors.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Night Walk
Boats slip into the harbor.
At one end of the dock, we walk
through a makeshift arch festooned
with flags, left over from the last
festival. Pretend it is a portal
to another time: choose one,
before this quiet flowers
into a battering ram.
I dont know where
you’ll wind up,
I don’t know
where I am.
In response to small stone (111).
Laredo
modern cowboy’s lament
You’re too florid, too weepy
for this sleepy street—
even the fireplug looks away.
The sidewalk should tip you off:
this ain’t no lone prairie.
Tumbleweeds never make it across I-35
so how the hell did you?
We’re proud of our values here—
especially our property values.
Only broke people walk
& to loiter is to litter.
We may wear big hats
as if at some point expecting
exposure to the elements
but for God’s sake, son,
we die behind closed doors.
*
For those who aren’t familiar with the old ballad I’m riffing on, here’s the Wikipedia article.
Dessert with woodpile
Night Willow
(after Beth Adams)
The only ones I knew, those that fringed the man-made lake in my hometown, interspersed with red bottlebrush trees.
I used to have a sepia print made by an artist friend who just passed away— The woodcut showed rowboats on choppy water, the City Hall in the distance; and, distinct at the edges of the frame, the long-fingered leaves of willows.
In their shade, early mornings, an elderly Chinese man came to lead T’ai Chi exercises: single whip, warding off, cloud hands, wild horse spreading mane. Shoes made no sound on the grass.
This is my dream painting: shot through with yellow gleam of lamplights, shadows hunched or hugging their knees like granary gods.
Moss lining the undersides of jagged stones— so even here, it might be possible to say there is still kindness to be found.
Is this what you mean? I’ve decided to stop knotting up my questions and lobbing them like weapons into the trees.
The sky at night can be the color of ash, can be the color of burnished metal.
If the nest is a purse, then it is so high up in the branches I could not possibly plunder it or probe its depths.
Dear mystery: daily, night after night, I think you’re testing me; I won’t fight with you anymore.
Branches sough, and shapes of leaves shift in the wind. One by one my daughters will fly away.
Lit, candles burn down into bowls of liquid wax, even as their smoky fragrance lingers.
Tell me in your own time what you want to say.
In response to Cassandra Pages: Night Willow.