Continuing Education (or, cool stuff I learned last week)

1. Frugivorous Fish

The are quite a few species of fish in the Amazon (including some pirhanas) that eat fruit and seeds in flood season, and are instrumental in seed dispersal.

2. Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream

Rumored to be the best ice cream ever by some who have dared to create it. According to the chemists involved, the smaller the ice crystals in the ice cream, the creamier the texture (always desirable). With the following method, the mixture freezes so fast that only small ice crystals have time to form. Liquid nitrogen is poured (veerrrrry carefully) into any standard ice cream base and stirred. In a short time ... Ben and Jerry's, eat your heart out! I didn't know this, but liquid nitrogen will usually just boil away if splashed on the skin. The only way to get a really bad "cold burn" is if it's trapped in contact with the skin -- in a closed fist, for instance. I'm trying to convince Scott that we should make the experiment, come summer. He's not too enthused.

3. Here Comes The Rain ... Again

A body of water contaminated by soap, even a very thin layer not visible to the eye, has a lower surface tension than normal. Thus, when raindrops fall into such a lake, they can keep their shape for several seconds, floating around like little drops of mercury. We got caught in a downpour on the docks by Lake Washington and witnessed this, although we couldn't figure out what we were seeing. If you can describe a phenomenon accurately, you can almost always Google a good answer. I'm not one hundred percent sure this is the right explanation, but it seems to fit.

Now that I've finally assimilated the software to post pictures, I can inflict cat photos on all of you at will (fiendish laughter). This was, in fact, completely unposed; anything paper left lying around seems to draw him to take ownership of it, usually by lying down on whatever I'm trying to work on. Peter, notice what Hobbes has (apparently) been reading ...

Greensleeves and The One Poem

So I'm curled up on the couch in the family room; in the parlor Scott is improvising beautifully on Greensleeves, switching back and forth between piano and guitar. It used to drive me mad to hear him play something so lovely and know it wasn't being recorded; I couldn't hold onto it, have it again. So different from poetry, which you can always have again. But I've become accustomed. It exists for the moment and I hear it; that's enough. When I breathe in, I smell the daphne odora aureomarginata -- part lemon and part heaven -- trimmed from the bush that was my grandmother's, now my mother's. The small blooms are four-pointed stars with a glitter in their white faces and a purple-rose reverse. Gold piping around the green leaves.

C. Dale Young is talking/asking about "the one" -- the poem that grabbed you by the throat, pulled you beyond yourself. I wish I could remember just one. I didn't encounter so much a single poem as a good teacher, Jim Mitsui, in my freshman year. He started us off on the Williams red wheelbarrow and "this is just to say" (plum poem). The poems that still stick in my memory from those years are "On Hearing A New Escalation", "Landscapes", and "The Art of Poetry" by Richard Hugo, "Lost" and "A Field Guide To Dungeness Spit" by David Wagoner, and "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath. And William Stafford, Kenneth O. Hanson, Neruda.

I didn't encounter "The Second Coming" until a few years ago, and it blew me away. Out of every poem I've ever read, that's the one I'd most like to have written, or something just like it, with the same power. It's surprising (in a good way) how many other poets feel the same.

Bloggish Serendipity

My blog takes its name from New Zealand slang for "happy, joyous", as in "Happy as a box of birds". It's fun to say, and seemed appropriate considering my fascination with birds. Today, I happened across this:

"life is a box
filled with songs, the box opens
and a flock
of birds
flies out
and wants to tell me something"

--Pablo Neruda, The Invisible Man

This is from the first of a series of Neruda's "elemental odes", of which he said, "This is how I published a long history of time, things, artisans, people, fruit, flowers, and life." Some of the odes were published in a Venezualan newspaper; Neruda agreed to contribute poems on the condition that they would appear, not in the literary supplement, but in the news section. Which I find appealing.

Variations on a Theme

C. Dale Young (pantoum necrosis) and Deborah Ager (basal pantoum) seem to have initiated "GoogleWhacking for Poets", where one of the two words comes from our specialized vocabulary (a form, device, etc.) May I offer "noctilucent triolets" and "pyromania sestinas"? I thought "sestina(s)" would be easy, but I forgot about all that material on McSweeney's. A side benefit of GoogleVersing is that you may happen across great poetry sites you never heard of, or forgot about.

Raven Poem for C. Dale Young

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Letter to Mitsui from Paradise Lodge


Mountain huckleberries blaze up
as they should in late September,

red sealing wax
on the folds of Tahoma.

At dawn, a charcoal turbulence
of wings over the roofline.

Look, hawks, said two boys below.
I leaned out my window, told them,

No, they're ravens. Every child
should learn to recognize that trickster

who brought us moon and sun and stars.
Remember the story? Raven disguised

as a pine needle, then a young boy,
crying for the bright fire hoarded

in the old man's cedar boxes, light cascading
down to earth when grandfather gave in?

Autumn valleys sizzled with ash and spirea,
a pearly haze of everlasting seedheads.

Raven escaped through the smokehole,
smudging his feathers black,

the color of your hair
back when you taught me

how to gather the seeds of words,
carry a box of portable flames.

I write on stone with a fresh match
as sparks wing from the chimney.

An arc of cedar smoke becomes
the milky way, the germinating stars.

Chaenomeles Burning and Strange Destinies

Uncannily, unseasonably warm for the last several days -- it was 62 in Seattle today, the same as Tampa. It got up to 69 in Port Angeles, apparently the warmest day ever in Washington in January. The crimson, yellow-stamened flowering quince at the mall is blooming like there's no tomorrow (which indeed there may not be if we get another cold snap). Gorgeous, but it made me thirsty for spring, and we've still got nearly three months of (alleged) winter.

What goes better with an open sunroof than turning up old beloved songs on the radio? It seemed to be the day for DJs to google what became of all these guys. Peter Garrett, the former lead singer of "Midnight Oil" (Blue Sky Mine, Beds Are Burning) is now an Australian Labour MP. Well, I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. But try this on for size: John Leydon (aka Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols infamy) has most recently been hosting 1/2 hour programs about bugs for the Discovery Channel. There must be some ironic moral here, but it's escaping me.

The Persistence of Jays, Etc.

Some birds will do anything for suet. I've noticed before that most of the Stellar's Jays aren't good grabbers, in terms of gripping a surface that doesn't feel secure to them. Thus, they have a problem with the suet feeder, sized more for the chickadees and nuthatches. One came up with a partial solution today; he bounced back and forth between two branches under the feeder, spearing a gulp of suet in transit each time. Not dignifed, but effective.

Relentless saturating rains today, straight from Hawaii, after a good spell of dry sunny weather. I've never seen such a batch of pathetic birds, drenched through. The ruby-crowned kinglet was especially pitiful, several shades darker than his usual fluffy olive self. He has a scarlet topknot of feathers that usually only manifests itself when he is feeling defensive or startled; today he was so matted down it was visible all the time. I'm fascinated by these secret flashes of color, sparking out unexpectedly on seemingly-drab birds; the iridescent red at the throat of a female Anna's hummingbird, the orange undersides of a flicker's wings, exposed only in flight. Is there a word for those hidden feathers?

I don't know what designers have against green. Good greens. Why should it be so hard to find the perfect green silk blouse, or sweater? Every possible variant of pink, purple, blue is available. Why can I only find lime (death to my complexion), olive (same), mint (insipid), teal (not green), hunter (too dour), or Kelly (not for non-polo-shirt-wearers)? Is a perfect fern, clover, spring grass, apple, moss, or peapod too much to ask? Sadly, it appears to be. I'd even settle for a decent jade or emerald at this point, but no....

Snarl, hiss. Why do poetry boards atract people whose proper calling in life appears to be street fighting, no Queensbury rules? It seems such a waste of time, effort, and spleen to me, these insult-fests or flame wars or whatever you want to call them. I'm not talking about tough, reasoned, honest crit -- that's essential, or what's the point of getting feedback? It's the off-topic, ad hom garbage that always seems to attract much of the voltage of the board away from serious discussion. Call me a shrinking violet; fair enough. But that stuff really puts me off. I don't thrive on spite and malice, however cleverly-phrased.

Here is an apologia for suburbia, or quiet lives in general; a quote from Flaubert that Cambell McGrath paraphrased in an interview:

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." --Gustave Flaubert

This certainly seems to work for me; the more orderly (not boring, mind you, just under control) my life is, the more undistracted energy I have for my work. Now if I could just achieve that measure of orderliness...

A New Addiction

Ok, word-junkies ... don't say you weren't warned. Thanks to David Vincenti, I have become enamored of GoogleWhacking (which is both less obscene and more dangerous than it sounds.) The goal is to enter any two words, sans quotation marks, into Google and get only one result.

Both words must be in Google's dictionary; you can tell if they are by looking in the upper righthand portion of the screen where it says "Results 1 - 1 of 1 for (say) venal bioluminsence"; both "venal" and "bioluminescence" will be blue and underlined (like this). Results from online dictionaries or any other type of word list are ineligible. The GoogleWhack site above has a provision to record your qualifying GoogleWhacks. This is actually a lot of fun, if a pernicious waste of time. I've found two today: "venal bioluminescence", as above, and "trenchant cloudberries".

In addition to forcing the players to reach into the more obscure alleys of their vocabularies, both the process and the results of other users on the official GoogleWhack list have the potential to reveal some intriguing juxtapositions. I'll take my poetry fodder wherever I can find it (she said, in an attempt to rationalize her habit...)

Later the same night ... we cannot stop, my preciousssss ... save us before we seach again. I forgot to say about the scoring method (for those who care about such things). Probably the easiest approach is to multiply the individual google hits for each word. For instance, "numberless pimientos" breaks down thusly: google hits for "numberless" = 198,000; google hits for "pimientos" = 194,000. 198,000 x 194,000 = 38,412,000,000.

Some of the more amusing recent entries from the official GoogleWhack register:

carpetbagger flummeries
evanescing sausages
fandango gristmills
campy persnicketiness
megalomaniacal hibernator
kibitzing wedgies
velvety grunions

The Mountain and Snow Envy

Around here, Mt. Rainier is "The Mountain", needing no other naming. We were driving down to see Scott's family in Graham, about an hour south of us. The drive takes us through the small town of Orting, whose main distinguishing feature is a bell tower sporting a gigantic metal daffodil at its base (in honor, I suppose, of their spring Daffodil Festival). Rainier looks enormous from there. The sky was typical January, all cold blue and rose and grey. The snow-clad surfaces of the mountain were exactly the same color as the surrounding sky, so all you could see of the mountain were striations of exposed rock, doing an excellent imitation of twisting charcoal clouds. Strange, when the eyes don't accept what the mind knows to be there. It was very surreal, and beautiful. Rainier is always stunning, never the same twice, and it's easy to forget the danger of living on its skirts. It's a dormant volcano, but not a dead one, and eruption is a very real possibility. Not to mention the threat of scenarios short of a full eruption that could still send lahars, mud flows the consistency of cement down the valleys at 60 miles per hour. They have reached all the way to Puget Sound in the past; everything in the valley from Orting to Auburn is built on what's left of them. Regardless, the area around Orting (right in the mouth of the beast, if you will) is being developed at a scorching rate. I wonder about the thought processes of the people who buy these homes. Are the prices too good to pass up, or do they just figure "it will never happen here"? What do they make of the "Volcano Evacuation Route" signs spaced at regular intervals along the two-lane road that could never handle that kind of traffic?

This is the time of year I always fall victim to snow envy. It's hit and miss for us in Seattle -- most years we at least get a dusting, maybe a couple of inches, but it's anyone's guess ... we have the most apologetic weather forecasters I have ever heard. I guess being stuck between two mountain ranges in proximity to the ocean makes for an ... interesting meteorological situation. And apparently, snow is especially difficult to pin down (or so they would have us believe). We had maybe a half inch Saturday night, and now they're saying maybe tomorrow night we might get a bit more, but it's a crapshoot. I can't complain; it's been a lovely winter so far, with (it feels like) more sunshine than usual. But I crave the snow, and it has to be here. When I whine to my friends about failed forecasts, they always say, "Just go up to the mountains, up to the pass, it's so close." Which, indeed, it is. But it's not the same. There's something about the smell and the silence of snow, of standing under your own streetlight, mesmerized by flake patterns, and knowing you can go inside and curl up with hot cider whenever you get cold. And it's the transformative power of snow I desire ... all the known things, all the dead patches in the lawn, the sewer drains, the terrible hack job the neighbors did on their weeping Japanese maple -- all covered over and perfected.

Notebook Page (or what passes for one)

Eduardo started this drive for posting pages from our notebooks. Which I think is a fun idea. Here are some of my jottings from a document that serves the same purpose:

Petals from the arbor swirl
around the ankles of a couple
walking to the gift shop;
tiny hurricanes
of dessicated tears.
--the whole winery thing -- sensuous heady smell of fermentation--
barrels stained with red wine -- french oak -- "toasted" over an open fire == only a strong red can take medium or more "toasting"
chill wine to stop fermentation
for red wine, crush everything up together, seeds, stems, skin

-------------------------------------------------------------------


You may have only seen
them bleaching and half buried, becoming
their own tombstones.

layered ten to twenty deep in the
tenements of sand

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In January, halls lined
with a forced march of forsythia

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open your bibles to november

it's been a long time since this light
was a river

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starlings -chatter, contradicting the sun (wind), always a different song, lining the wires, sleek, scatting to the/a masses/cadre
of cats far below.
"chatterers in the marketplace, listening or telling something new"
scatter, spurt, chitter, spat, crackle, squabble, eavesdropping, "for company", companies, advertise, birds of the quick connection,
each branch in the cottonwood upholds a different opinion.
cotttonwood leaves pixilating in the westering sun.
they have been clinging to wires too long,
sinking their claws into current
plumage lights up with every color, overlayed with binary splashes of black and white.
until dusk switches them off
into other fields for the night.

snap at each other with coin-purse mouths
morse code--dots and dashes (markings); slick
tv's in suburban windows -light dark light

Probably every reader knows that starlings aren’t really supposed to be here in North America, that they owe their presence in our yards to a misguided romantic named Eugene Scheiffelin, who in 1890 decided that every bird mentioned in William Shakespeare’s writings deserved a place in North America. Accordingly, he imported 60 starlings, which he released in Central Park. Observers were charmed when a pair built a messy nest right on the façade of the American Museum of Natural History. Delighted, Scheiffelin and his followers imported 40 more the following year. But delight faded to concern and finally outright disgust when the starlings made it clear that they intended to cover the earth, or at least the façade, with evidence of their presence. (henry IV) mortimer

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tangled in steel strings, the plot
of polyester fibers thickening
to green us into place; your hands grown into
the soundboard, mine on your shoulders.
We'll be safe beneath the Verilux, 10,000 hour bulbs,
the irrigation of minor chords.
They'll need to bring a backhoe
if they want to tear us out.

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The Art of the Sharp-shinned Hawk

No glorious orbit over a straggling field,
no plummet to deadeye the harrowed meal.

Those he pursues also take flight,
twitter to hide in thickets of pine.

What matter if branches snap at his scapulars,
twigs reap the down from his breast in pale tatters?

He'll follow them anywhere, pockets
of life compact of seed and song.

He'll tackle wingspans twice his size
whenever they stray across his sights.

Don't offer him carrion; prey must be fresh
when he sickles his name to the favored branch.

Feathers gyre from the sky, of little consequence.
He gives himself to plucking out the red elastic flesh.

Poison Paw

Everyone's a critic. Including (apparently) my cat, Hobbes. I was revising a poem, and left the room with the document up and the laptop open on the kitchen counter. Imagine my surprise as I returned to find my final couplet reduced to this:

Feathers gyre from the sky, of little consequence.
He gives himself to [';;]\wsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Note carefully the angry cat face inside the brackets; two little dots (for eyes) above two commas (for exposed fangs). I can only assume what follows is a transcribed hiss and/or snarl.

This is what I get for leaving a bird poem where he could get at it.

As if I don't have enough merciless editors in my life.

Anniversary

Yesterday was my mom & dad's 40th anniversary. What with the dark time of year and levels of death and destruction both far away and near to us, no one was in the mood for a big shindig -- that's coming in the spring, when celebration arises naturally. But yesterday was the actual day, so we curled up on their couch and drank wine and burnt our tongues on five-star hot chili chocolate truffles, reminisced and listened to Scott play guitar.

Much of the good in my marriage has grown from observing theirs. They never yelled, ever ... I don't think I even realized they disagreed until I was a teenager. They spent lots of time together, but felt free to pursue their own interests. This would especially be my dad, who over the years has fanatically pursued a wide selection of skills, including sailing, photography, boat building, kite flying, wine making, playing the recorder and making gourmet cheesecakes (I miss that phase). My mom was cool with it all -- her things are gardening and baseball. Of course there have been rough spots, but through it all they have always made each other laugh, and hugged and kissed like newlyweds. They have been blessed, and so have I.