One day . . .

Dr. Seuss, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Ruth Krauss

[photo: http://www.k-state.edu/english/nelp/purple/photographs.html]


Her prose poem "News" (1961) makes me so happy I don't know what to do. It's separated into six short sections. Here is one of the sections:

"This measure," the Attorney-General stated, "This legislation-- which I endorse-- requires some thirty thousand skylarks to register for the first time with my office." And he left the room.

Five for Monday

1. I couldn't remember the phrase "negative capability" when I was teaching. What does that mean?

2. A man came by with a screen for my office window, but I haven't seen the aggressive squirrel in at least a week.

3. Everything stopped, then started again.

4. I'm still getting used to my dedicated walking shoes.

5. The perks of being a Joanna.

The Housemartins!

To Keep My Hands Busy

Nova Scotia, Summer 2009

Sigh . . .

Slight cardiac ache on a peaceful subway

Your heart has a charge and I think the word eons
but mean the word ions. I'm thinking to meditate
on the right particles or valence or molecules.
It's funny the language I don't know about myself.

One time in Philadelphia, they sent me to the machine;
they read the tape and I was fine, except for one of the more
common arrhythmias. A lovely word. "Meet
my daughter, Arrhythmia."

People get on at 42nd, but not so many I have to shift
in my seat and clamp my elbows in. I'm thinking, To breathe,
and certain things I quietly delight in-- a young and lovely
black woman in '20s era dress; the calm and deliberate way

the woman across reads a gossip magazine, the dignity
of her posture; and, earlier, a young man reaching
across a puddle of slush to steady an old woman.
My heart in there sending out waves and eons.

Tangled Up in Blue

Flowers, hey!

Saturday, Early February, 12:14 p.m.

The expected snow never came. You might say I'm only happy when I'm with you or when I see a funny dog or think about kittens or California or the South Seas and Pippi Longstocking. I woke up wondering if your forehead was made of diamonds and if you still hated me for hating "Myth Busters," and I let you make the coffee very strong. Then you stretched up and curled your arms around like a kung fu monk and walked out of the room. I can still hear you in there. You are expanding yourself and taking big breaths.

Initial thinking (for team review only)

1. Build some time in.
2. Cost per use.
3. Some other instrument or medium I can't describe. Something like a loom and a piano, a Mr. Microphone and a harp.
4. Pay attention to the voice-over.
5. Volunteers across all five boroughs.
6. Meaning is a shaky edifice.
7. A festival. Pieces of tin on our outfits; in our hair and teeth, stars.
8. On the subway stairs, vision of (a) cattle car and (b) melting ego.
9. Sliding the tiles around for the proper effect.
10. If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.

Perfect Bird

(a kind-of ghazal)

[poem was here]

Bonnie "Prince" Billy sings Bill Withers

Odetta

Portrait

(an older piece)

He started out 5'8", but by the time their romance was over, he was 4'3", and she didn't know what to do with him. Sometimes he would sneak into her pocket when she was on her way out to the library and wait until she was in the middle of trying to remember something important before popping out under her armpit and humming love songs toward her ear. His hum was the hum of a forgetful mime. Overall, his personality was that of a juggler irritated by a parking ticket. Sometimes, though, he reminded her of a man with sad eyes, given to slicking down his hair with something that smelled like her grandfather, making her like him terribly. "Bright Eyes," her friends called him behind his back. And it was true: He was as impudent as Charlton Heston. Bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked.

He had taken up smoking to get back at his parents for giving him an alliterative name, but then one day he told her, "You don't know what sad is until you've seen the mattress your parents slept on your whole life thrown into a garbage truck." By then he had given up smoking, and she was about to move to Canada for reasons of her own, having to do with a movie she had once seen.

When she got there, she realized that he probably missed her but that he was probably the kind of person who would give himself one day to be sad before distracting himself with ukelele lessons. She occupied herself with arranging her spices and cheering up the dog, and then on the 17th day after she moved, she got very sad while measuring the coffee.

Morning Poem

11:15 on the couch with an English muffin and really good jam.
Pomegranate strawberry (almost wrote "poem-agranate"). A plate
inherited somehow from my little (half-)brother's grandmother--

white with green garlandy leaves and yellow, orange, and blue
flowers. Halfway through the first month of the second decade
of the 2000s. I could not have imagined this when I was younger.

I'm not sure what I thought I'd be. But I love,
somehow, this plate, this jam, this sitting here. Still,
a city might fall down on itself in a place you have never been.

Port-au-Prince has fallen down on itself. What does this mean
about how we care for each other? About a sunny day in
upper Manhattan, in the year 2010? Everything and nothing.

Pray for us.

The Kind of Thing I Find Weirdly Comforting

"Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

8 1/2: "Asa nisi masa"

Birthday 1978, Revolver