Falling now,
great flakes,
wind slant,
sidelong
swoon.
A room,
a window,
slightly ajar.
Where you are -
in a cold place,
in a warm room,
under your skin.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
if
if I read the numbers
if I plead with gods
if I take pills to sleep
if I despair
if I don't understand why this disease
furiously fights for him
if I cannot speak
if he grows weaker, then rebounds
if he lives through this
if he dies
if again and again
we'll have more
weeks up and down
if the grandchildren look at their great uncle
eyes wide and cry
Papa? Papa?
as if their word for you,
worried,
homeless,
might find him instead
if I cannot say dead
if I cannot say cured
if I have too many words
but never enough
Cicada
蝉 Semi Cigarra الزيز alziz 매미 maemi cikade greier zikadak
蝉 Chán సికాడా Sikāḍā सिकाडा sikaada ሲካዳ sīkada
1. cicada disaaweshiinh+yag 2. cicada meminaabawijiisi+wag 3. cicada meminaabawijiisii+g
https://cicada.world/partners/indigenous-groups/anishinaabe/
http://www.fonozoo.com/quartau/index_eng.php
https://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/category/locations/europe-continent/
https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/understanding-japan/cicadas
Monday, January 25, 2021
lie
Dark roast, no milk.
Careful. Sorrow distracts, causes overfill, spillage.
This wake's within. We knew you knew not to come, cried alone,
but wouldn't hide what died among the stones.
Conversations after funerals, measured by mug size. Black water reflects another lie:
one who championed gender-neutral rules of law
because she
hates the use of the word mother
Thank
you so much for your support. Beat me with your flag.
Call me nigger fifteen times.
I am black, and I am blue. My life, to you, doesn't matter.
I hadn't slept much the night before, anxiously waiting for Georgia's results - little
time to celebrate.
Found a priest to give Last Rites. She died last night, my mother, mother, mother.
Εν μόνον αγαθόν είναι, την επιστήμην, και εν μόνον κακόν, την αμαθίαν.
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
(Socrates)
What we have learned! Many, many people in this
country will kill for a lie.
Ropes aren't tropes.
Liars leave gallows to break things, then take flight. What falls from the sky as they flee?
I tend to small truths, wounded, bleeding.
Liars have dropped them, tweeting, on stones.
Ousted liars call their wives, then disappear, clear out, travel south.
Drink your coffee in silence.
portrait
Red ink and spilt milk
on a shirt of blue.
Coups are a bit like death. They wipe out everything.
The tree in the wood
should fall
but did it?
All we know is supposed.
On a warm day, the birds sing, bring in ten o'clock,
summoned, assembled, inflamed .
Precipitation is humidity, wind, mixes
with skin, and water,
alters lives.
Are we to remain silent?
The Connellsville Seam is exhausted.
Nearly pure soft coal,
stolen from the earth,
births steel, watched water
wash away Johnstown.
Frick's Tintoretto
Procurator of San Marco,
the second most prestigious life appointment in the Republic of Venice,
gazes into a dark interior, away from the blue sky above a blue sea.
Johnstown's brown drowning,
near dark miners digging shoals of coal.
Save the town, if we can keep it. No.
Lake's gone, along with the fish.
Sense of debt to the dead?
Frick bought Tintoretto instead.
Dreaming of blue faces underwater,
her brothers drowning,Karolina Olsson of Oknö
slept for 32 years and 42 days,
drank daily 2 glasses of sweetened milk.
In America, she might have been found drowned too.
those who've crossed from one country to another,
in slave ships, steerage.
Sometimes, it spits us out,
shares us with fish.
Not so rare a dish for fish,
before or after arrival,
the slave, the immigrant.
The noon siren sounds.
Warm flats smell of cooking.
From the window, rough waves
and a tree, split in two.
Beyond the breakwater,
something's blinking
red, death-pale,
and blue.
Friday, January 22, 2021
poems
1
unega means white in Cherokee
birch snow
sugar water
Blue Ridge
white
river forest
Lake Lure
2
who works around the corner
lurks among the elderberry
ornery old bat
that catamount
3
illness has a face
small and delicate
but a tall body
thin shadowed
at first
but then it lurches
forward,
finds you
bloats
until you float inside
dark and afraid
4
The Uffizi is free online.
So too the Tate.
Isn't that great?
From the Arno, Thames
I've buckles plucked from the muck.
Skill and luck -
My people -
painters, mudlarks.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
the sutra in denmark
Fish paste and planes are temporal; I've found them in the
Satipatthāna Sutta: under Impermanence,
with expiration dates.
This refrain arises 13 different times in the sutra -
and now
contemplate the arising
the passing away
and both the arising and the passing away.
The sound of
the sutra is a passenger plane, drowsy,
(nearly empty, masked, full rows for each solitary)
nodding asleep,
crossing lakes, mountains, rivers, fens,
then ballenas, blind creeks, karst and kettles,
settling into descent, touching salt water.
It's there,
where Kastrup and Chek Lap Kok are building islands,
reclaiming strands - new Doggerlands.
Land arising doesn't last.
Nothing does, and not even that!
So don't pass, in either place, on fish paste.
It ought to be bought
duty free, in
Kastrup and Chek Lap Kok.
Then settle in, clock arrivals, departures.
Who here, there, will start a new life, flee?
The sutra seas are full of jellyfish, not whales.
Birds land on shale beaches to fish estuaries.
I eat fish paste and watch,
from a room with a sutra in Amager, looking north -
flatlands, flat skies, birches,
perches for cormorants and crows.
Chóu sāan's sutra is rising like a low star,
faraway, over books and buildings
and broken lives.
I've saved nothing but poems.
So many jellyfish!
Near Amager, sinks an old carcass of a whale,
stale stink when the wind blows right.
The fish paste I like comes in a tube,
squeezes out
star-shaped trails of roe.
I've no bread for it, or for the prisoners of
politics and ventilators.
Even Kastrup's caught it, that feeling of
intubation, where both the arising and the passing away take
sounds, slake
arising and passing away
into one distance, together.
Grassy Hill (Chinese: 草山; Cantonese Yale: Chóu sāan) is the fourteenth highest mountain in Hong Kong.
Monday, January 18, 2021
small water
Un poco y no bien, you said.
So why go, I asked,
when you know
the quarry killed Alan,
stunned him with a stone,
ate him whole.
And what about that other one,
river snags snatched him,
dog-paddling in
swift currents.
C'mon, you said.
And I said No.
Mother's brother
taught us terror,
pulling us under
in pools and small lakes.
We knew muck slipped, leechy
criks, carried sticks and
matches, pockets of salt.
Come early spring, we knew not to wade streams.
Quarry, river, pool, slick streams, these waters we knew, were wary of.
We hadn't yet met immensity.
Riptides, vortices, sudden rogues?
Folk tales.
Flash floods, tidal surges, tsunamis?
Dreams.
Waters scaled larger were too far away to fear.
Some took chances in the waters here,
gave little thought to cost.
Odds with small water, a few always lost.
To You in ICU with Covid19
One breath, two. I cannot see you,
alone, prone,
sloughed soles, blood clots.
Knots in trees, these,
your exhalations, and irregular.
Ventilator hum
becomes soughing
boughs, the branches of your fruit trees.
Your garden's lemons, crushed.
Sweet-sour runnels from them
tunnel, funnel,
spill into, fill us.
Troughs inside our hearts
trench, pool into you.
Fourteen
masked family members
vigil in the parking lot
outside your room.
I can't be there to pray with them
so I play hymns to Mary.
Listen!
Oh, Mother of Stars!
How yellow bright our love for him!
Friday, January 15, 2021
things 2
things with wings
voices stolen from turtles
(long-tailed grackle)
brackish water of park puddles
muddied feet
the coot
shooting pigeons
poor vectors of disease
pleased with ourselves
with our shelves, cases, drawers
stuffed with feathers
we've pillowed
pilloried
potshot
not what they are
but we -
lack of pluck
our
imaginative geography
things 1
things
occur to me
like
wings
of crested cormorants
box turtles
and salamanders
crossing roads
toads
none seen this year
though one
I hear was found in the arugula
sturgeon
and
nanaimo fisheries
and
above,
higher, colder than the lakes
an ulu of a moon
white
rain
again
inches of it
and the black river
not as black as
this room
a shadow
flying
at the edges of this lamp
Monday, January 11, 2021
Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺)1861 writer Kanagaki Robun and artist Utagawa Yoshitora
 |
https://www.openculture.com/2018/11/a-japanese-illustrated-history-of-america.html
Friday, January 8, 2021
Thursday, January 7, 2021
樺太犬 Karafuto-ken, Sakhalin husky and Laika (notes)
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dr. Edward Wilson d. 1912 Scott expedition -Tree creeper (Certhia familiaris) 1899 |
樺太犬 Karafuto-ken
犬
http://keiji-hagiwara.blogspot.com/2011/01/sakhalin-husky-dogs-who-survived-in.html
Nordic Spitz-type dog (Akita inu)
Long coated Akitas, or Woolies, are thought to be a throwback to a dog called the Karafuto, which was introduced into Akita bloodlines many years ago by Japanese breeders. Japan has a diverse climate and the northern prefectures are very cold, so to increase the coat density of a normally coated Akita, they introduced the bloodlines of this beautiful breed.
Dogs first arrived in Antarctica on the 17th of February 1899 when 75 were landed by the ship Southern Cross of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1898 - 1900 at Cape Adare in the Ross Sea area. The landing was followed by a four day blizzard which trapped seven men ashore, they had a large tent and survived by bringing all of the dogs in to lie on top of them to keep them warm, dogs in Antarctica proved their worth from the outset.
In April, one of the dogs was thought lost when it was blown out to sea on an ice floe, it turned up in good condition and spirits ten weeks later (around midwinter) demonstrating the ability of dogs to survive in Antarctica. Ole Must and Persen Savio, two Norwegian Laplanders of 22 and 21 years respectively were the first two people to drive dog teams in Antarctica.
The last dogs were taken from Antarctica on Feb 22nd 1994, a consequence of an environmental clause in the Antarctic Treaty that required non-native species to be removed. In the case of dogs, specifically because distemper (a disease of dogs) could potentially spread from the dogs to the native seals of Antarctica.
http://www.vaakitarescue.org/LongCoat.html
THE LAST HUSKY IN ANTARCTICA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dN2OjygNk
https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/wildlife/dogs_huskies.php
https://polarscienceiscool.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/no-dogs-allowed/
http://willsteger.com/speaking/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/antarctica-live/2013/dec/04/douglas-mawson-antarctic-trek
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2005/04/21/reference/a-pack-of-dog-statues/
https://www.hettahuskies.com/en/our-farm-dogs/more-about-huskies/sleddogs-and-exploration
https://nzaht.org/118-year-old-painting-found-in-antarctica/
Sakhalin Laika
Russian: Ла́йка, IPA: [ˈlajkə]
собака sobaka
Funk mentioned the Uilta (Orok) language, a reader published recently (2013), has only two rather elderly people who use the language on a regular basis. Both are women. One of them lives in Val. The other lived in Nogliki moved to Siberia in 2016.
Nivkh
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
https://www.lastwhispers.org/nivkh
Yakutian Laika
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