Fall 2010 misc

From Sept 26 2010 Sunday

In the documentary, the arthropod, a primitive scorpion, flexed itself to remove its orange-tinted exoskeleton, having grown a new one. The surrounding landscape resembled the Mojave Desert, with mesoliths in the background. The continent was Pangea. Small plants bifurcated into yellow bulbs that served as light receptors.

An arthropod has no memory, but a fish memorizes. It remembers the more dangerous straits and the safer water-lanes. The dragonfly fails to remember, but the lizard does. The raccoon remembers the tasks it performed for three years; dogs remember who I am. The fish remembers where to spawn. A young wolf learns how to spread its scent by pawing the earth from older wolves. Apes gouge grubs from the ground with dead branches. The abrupt thud in the background I recall as ice cubes falling into a bin in the freezer. Can feet discontinue swelling when entirely still? Follicles send shoots of hair post-mortem. A worm impaled becomes a double worm. The ape in the zoo who sees a cat may call the cat “ball.”

From October 10 Sunday

A workman-like clarity can be worth aspiring towards
Instead of willfully inflated rhetoric
not to be confused with that of Dylan Thomas.
Sunflower who twists as it aspires to the sun,
its multiple eyes plucked out, the kernels chewed.
Bitter lettuce leaves, their stems lifting them
From the bed of humus and manure and loam
From which they sprang, shaped like mouse-ears
The palest green of a liebfraumilch grape
Or the unripened egg-tomatoes that burden the stem
In a flurry of spiky complicated leaves.
So far the frosts fail to bow them entirely,
Their modest heights unsupported by splints.
The vines of the cucumber resemble the umbilicus
But have dried to the consistency of flower-stalks
And their leaves, once spanned to father sun
Like an outspread but webbed hand
Are crumpled-up and delicate as ash, and with the bellows of a mouth,
Could be blown away like ashen particles.
The leaves of the cucumber are as dry and as fragile as ash
As an ember that has cooled in the fire.

From September 12, 2010 Sunday

At first, my left ear was blocked, but now, it’s my right ear, which also rings. I pour the balm-like oil into the ear, until it begins to tickle the canal somewhat pleasantly as it turns out. And then a fizzing sound begins, first the sound of carbonated water poured into a glass, but amplified into a sound of muted thunder as the ear-wax dissolves and loosens from the walls of the ear canal and the tympanum, the latter accounting for much of the thunder. Then as I turn to my other side I hear a hole form through the canal in the air outside my ear, from which arise a range of higher-pitched noises that had until now been excluded from me—until the hole itself collapses, and the ringing begins and the ear is blocked again, despite my efforts to unblock it.

Fingers on piano keys fly while the fingers on the keyboard stumble in errors more difficult to unravel to fix than execute.

The composition on the sheet of music sings and moves ships to sail and airwaves to march and is also played in concert halls with balustrades of marble as pink as a seashell’s interior.

But the composition of the email, as hastily composed, never appears to the eyes of its intended reader, and for its typos, is relegated to the folder for junk.

Console yourself that the junk swelling the basements of museums across the globe is uncountable.

You must be the scribe who dictates to the believers. Staying in one place for days on end, the same backyard greeting you, cannot be justified.
The half-drunk family man in the men ‘s room of the sports bar pissing down his leg while cradling his cell phone tells his wife in alarm: Do not I repeat leave your daughter alone, she’s only ten. Then he’s asking her the score. Is he betting? This is not, I tell myself, an hospitable environment in which to be, nor was it when I met co-workers for the happy hour.