Term's End

A glimpse of someone's study spot: a reminder of what I do (the challenge of learning with guidance from a demanding teacher) and don't (exams -- taking them, writing them, giving them, grading them) miss.

On Torture

This morning, when coming up and out from Guerry Garth Gracie and turning into the covered walkway along the Quad, I saw a slug making its way toward grass and shrub. I paused, let Gracie slip out toward the student guide leaving her tour group and heading toward us. I cautioned her about the slug while she chatted and watched her step over the creature before continuing on ahead of us.

Then I came home and read this,

Slugs

by Brian Swann

Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails

have shells, but all these have is—nothing.

Small black antennae like fat pins wave

as if they could take in enough to get them through.

Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes,

pale and unmarked as babies. They flow,

the soil itself learning how to move and, moving,

almost staying still, their silver monorail

the only evidence of where they’d been.

And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully)

out of the human ear’s range, between two stones,

under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips

of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say,

do something. Don’t just take it. But they die

as they had lived, exuding slime, like

the smaller boys, who’d just

stand there, miserable in short pants,

school socks down to their ankles,

school tie unknotted and askew, and flowing

from noses slow cauls of snot that

from time to time they’d lick or sniff back up

part way, until it flowed again, coating

the upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixing

with tears before anything had been done,

the fear itself enough, so even if we wanted

we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it was

the knee “where you daren’t show your mother,”

other times the kick in the shins, the stick over

the head, the punch in the mouth, while they

just stood there, or double up, gasping

for breath, and we did it again.

Suddenly, I remembered that as a child I learned to pour salt on slugs. I watched them, delighted to see them shrivel, dying before me, without ever, even once, considering what I was doing. I want to think I fel pleasure because I was a child and because I believed that whatever a parent taught me to do was the right thing.

Since walking and looking and noticing, I am not so sure that I didn't enjoy the killing and dying for their own sake.

And I feel ashamed for years of mindless squashing.

Rainy Day Musing on a Number

Fifty-Fifty
by Patricia Clark

You can have the grackle whistling blackly 

        from the feeder as it tosses seed,

if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched 

        imperious as an eagle on the high branch.

You can have the brown shed, the field mice

        hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,

if I can have the house of the dead oak,

        its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.

You can have the deck at midnight, the possum 

        vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,

if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky 

        raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.

You can have the whole house, window to window, 

        roof to soffits to hardwood floors,

if I can have the screened porch at dawn, 

        the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

Making My Own Entertainment

A quiet day: dog walk, brunch, work, social media, reading, making an image, blogging.

I suspect I have always been able to spend hours by myself, a habit more children might well develop. Silence is sometimes golden, but silence isn't always silent when the mind and imagination are at play.

After this

I discovered this

So what if it's still foggy and rainy? I've got sunshine aplenty inside.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

     for Tony

I could not disengage my world

                                from the rest of humanity.

                                Wind chill factor 11° below. All night

wind thrashes barechested trees

like a West Texas tent evangelist

                                hissing them on his knees,

                                lisping

                                         sinnn . . . sinn . . . sinn . . .

                                         All night wind preaches.

Old tool shed

behind my house

fist-cuffs itself to nail-loose tin,

horse pasture gates

clank their crimes,

while neighing black stallions of rain

stampede on the patio

fleeing gunshots of thunder . . . .

Miles south of here,

nightscopes pick up human heat

that green fuzz helicopter

dash panels.

                    A mother whispers,

         “Sssshhhh mejito, nomás poco más allá.

                                 Nomás poco más allá.”

Dunes of playing-dead people

jack rabbit under strobe lights

and cutting whack/blades,

                     “Ssshhh mejito.

                    Sssshhhh.” Child whimpers

                    and staggers in blinding dust

                    and gnashing wind.

Those not caught, scratch sand up

to sleep against underbellies

of roots and stones.

Eventually Juanito comes to my door,

sick from eating stucco chips—

his meals scratched off

walls of temporary shelters,

and Enrique, who guzzled water

at industrial pipes

pouring green foam out

at the El Paso/Juarez border,

and Maria steaming with fever,

face dark meteorite, whispers,

                    “Where I come from, Señor Baca,

                    a woman’s womb is a rock,

                    and children born from me,

                    drop like stones, to become dust

                    under death squad’s boots.”

And Juanito,

                    “They came at midnight

                    and took my brothers. I have

                    never seen them since. Each judge’s tongue

                    is a bleeding stub of death, and each lawyer’s

                    finger a soft coffin nail.”

And Enrique,

                    “You can trust no one.

                    Each crying person’s eye is a damp cellar

                    where thieves and murderers sleep.”

They have found refuge here

at Black Mesa.

The sun passes between our lives,

as between two trees,

one gray, one green,

but side by side.

And So Say I Says BigAssCat!

The Cat's Song

by Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. 

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says 

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing 

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. 

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. 

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, 

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt. 

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat. 

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends, 

says the cat, although I am more equal than you. 

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body? 

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs? 

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch. 

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard. 

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings 

walking round and round your bed and into your face. 

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally 

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long. 

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers. 

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word 

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg 

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Picturing It Slant

So I cheated. 

The bridge to Hardee-McGee Field doesn't look exactly like this from underneath.

So what?

Thanks, Emily (Dickinson), for backing me up on this one:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

What's Old Is New Again

Burning the New Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

Me-too Weather Report

The Trees Delete Themselves Inside a Fog-Sphere
by Francis PongeTranslated by Karen Volkman

In the fog which surrounds the trees, the leaves are stripped—leaves defaced already by slow oxidation, deadened by the sap's out-seeping for flowers' and fruits' gain, since the harsh heats of August made of them a less.

In the bark, vertical furrows crease and slit where dampness drains to the earth's base, indifferent to the living citizens of the trunk.

Flowers scattered, fruit conferred. Since youth, this relinquishing of breathing attributes and body parts has become for the trees a standard practice.

A Favorite Pair of Words

Leaf Litter
by Heather McHugh

Things are not

unmoving (or else what

is ing there for?)

The things once-living

fall on the never-living

all the more movingly for the eye

that passes over them.

The wind wells up

to spill a trail

of onces off the nevers,

take opaque from eye

to mind, or near it —

every rocking takes some leaving

to a stonish spirit.

Golden Harvest, with apologies to Wallace Stevens

A beautiful fall day, my front porch rail, a Mason jar, one blue jay feather, a sprig of red berries, and three hickory nuts, their cases with the smell of home, that sharp pull of earth and childhood: even my humble jar pulled the "wilderness" around it and "took dominion."

Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround the hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The Real Thing

I fear I have spent
all my words spilled out
onto thousands of compositions
written by someone else
or on compositions of my own
or in countless notes about trivia
only a few care to know --
les Ballets Suedois designs
or the color of Charlemagne's eyes --
or thank-you notes
sent, discarded, forgotten
lifetimes ago. Now
I'd rather look
and in looking 
reserve my words 
for what might
matter some day.

Peaches

From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Weird Things I Remembered in the Car Wash

I
"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can," Mother repeating as she leaned over the tub to wash my hair.

II
Discovering what I forgot when I read The Little Engine That Could as an adult: the little blue engine's female gender


III
Lazy Sunday mornings at the Tchoupitoulas Pig and then the Uptown Car Wash & Express Lube, watching my Mazda move through the long tunnel, enjoying the hand buffers' banter.

IV
A poem.

One Boy Told Me
by Naomi Shihab Nye 

And I will be deep water too.
Wait. Just wait. How deep is the river?
Would it cover the tallest man with his hands in the air?

Your head is a souvenir.

When you were in New York I could see you
in real life walking in my mind.

I’ll invite a bee to live in your shoe.
What if you found your shoe
full of honey?

What if the clock said 6:92
instead of 6:30? Would you be scared?

My tongue is the car wash
for the spoon.

Can noodles swim?

My toes are dictionaries.
Do you need any words?

From now on I’ll only drink white milk
on January 26.

What does minus mean?
I never want to minus you.

Just think—no one has ever seen
inside this peanut before!

It is hard being a person.

I do and don’t love you— 
isn't that happiness?

V
Rocking in the wash and melancholia: an oddly pleasurable combination.