Musette

A step back

Another moment of perspective from our inspiring friends at Astronomy picture of the day. It's the Cone Nebula neighborhood, and the credit and copyright belong to Adam Block and Tm Puckett.

Our correspondents

The lovely Louise Steinman sent a bit of inspiration that's related to the book she's working on. The drawing came with this note: "...I was thinking I've probably never shown you the Ukranian Egg Cup Woman. I (or rather my friend Chery) found her in an antiques store in L'viv and she became our talisman, our Quan Yin as we traveled to the sites of ancestral massacres. She's a cheery lady: I do't know if her colors will be as bright as they really are, but here's a little drawing of her."

Our correspondents

David took this picture from the window of Kathryn's apartment in Paris. Now, with a view we haven't yet seen, she's living in upper Manhattan--the park-y Cloisters part--and she sent this poem. Which made me very happy.

About that Table You Fixed

If you dance on that table you’ll go out the window
you said, making light of your handiwork,
new table leg made from wood you found in the street,
table I found in the street, reason no leg,
but what a find, smooth blond wood,
adjustable for two or four, sized as if made
for drinking coffee in my new alcove,
the orchids breathing benediction
on your morning wet head across from mine.

If I went out the window
would I end up in the New York Post?
Woman falls to death in an excess of happiness
caused by lack of attention to the news about the war,
to illness and poverty, her own aging
accompanied by loss, missed career goals,
schadenfreude, a habit of anger and strain.
An onset of well-being
is more deadly than a speeding truck
if you’ve trained yourself to focus
in the normal way of life.
If I went out the window now I’d float,
arm and leg shaped balloon
pointed at by children
ignored by striding adults
inconsequent and feckless as
an April fly.

Those little flies that flicker,
kissing the glass window pane,
entranced by the sunlight they’ve
just been born to
in the world of manifest things.
And you would ask for the fly swatter,
putting your mug down on the
table you renewed
in the house of the renewed
and I would touch the fingers
that caress my old bones at night
and not give it to you
so the little flies, like me,
can continue their dance.

K. Hayashi
3/21/07

Breathe out

Not writing tonight, but preparing a list for a trip to the library tomorrow--Agha Shahid Ali's ghazals, a little Ellen Bryant Voigt. Thinking about the March project, whatever that might be... Meanwhile, something beautiful from the Astronomy Picture of the Day. *Complete info about the image is here.

Solar Eclipse from the Moon
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Hana Gartstein

Our correspondents

Got this note from Eric, who'd sent yesterday's mystery poem.

     "I came to poetry late, aged twenty-eight. I was writing fiction, and never thought I'd become a poet, or a dramatist - wrote all my plays when I was in my thirties. With poetry, I began by writing four to six a week. My first collection, Accidental Monsters, was completed in six months. So many of my poems were dictated into a tape recorder, while I was lying in bed. For me, poetry has been a different process from fiction, essays and drama. The others must be carefully mapped out, but poetry just comes. The creative process is more passive than most laymen think, even when you are dealing with structure, poetry the most passive of all. I began writing at nineteen, in 1966."

     The mystery poem was, he says, from his new book "Earthworks," which will be published this spring by Six Gallery Press.  He's written 10 books, including five collections of poetry. A mention of Charles Simic brought him here.

Magic

I came home tonight to find a poem, spirited to me by someone I don't know. It's a good one, so I'll post it, at least till the writer, one Eric Basso, tells me not to. And when I find out more about the origins of this piece, I'll post a follow-up. It's hot off the printer, looks like. Meanwhile, I'll just say it was like magic, discovering this in my in-box. Art that moves us finds us. Hallelujah.

Diurnal Insomnia

        the clock was ticking backwards
        on the roof of the pin factory
        and each night the hours passed
        so slowly that the city slept with

        one eye open but still dreams came
        merging their décor with patterns in
        the drapes which framed the window
        at the foot of every quaking bed

        stone gods rose from paralysis
        to a breakfast of bitter tea
        saw haloes pulsing feebly
        around extinguished lamps

        for weeks after we crossed to
        the other side there were blinding
        corridors of white pine and poplar
        as far as the eye could squint

                         --Eric Basso
                        January 23, 2006

Perhaps it was inevitable

Here's a little cosmic ripple I like. We started working on sijos in the workshop by looking at info pulled from a web page. I didn't pay much attention to the source, which was a long url in tiny type, but it turned out to be Sijo translations from Larry Gross, who just stopped by to mention Hwang Chin'i, a 16th century poet who appears to be quite the legend--"known for her exceptional beauty and sharp intellect" says the short bio. Sounds like a worthy role model! I'm making my way through more of the sijo pages, which look like a great resource. (Thanks, Larry.)

It also occurs to me that here, in the midst of a huge Korean community, there must be sijo scholars and enthusiasts. I will have to look around. And consult the lovely Chungmi.

Still trying to figure out how to make these things go--and then I'll make them messier. I need to work on the basic mechanics before blowing up the car....

The fair

I looked for a long time at the pigs at the county fair. The grown ones in their pens were all sleeping, and it struck me that they were all touching--sometimes back to back or spooned, sometimes facing one another and touching hooves. Pen to pen, one would extend a leg to reach another, and the chain of connection was unbroken through perhaps a dozen of the enclosures. It's the Chinese year of the golden boar, the fire pig.

And as far as I'm concerned, it can also be the year of the piglet, and the runt. David snapped this as I was waiting for the runt to wake up. Its litter-mates all managed to rouse themselves soon after the alpha piglet got up to nurse. Little alpha also walked up and tried to rouse the sow, climbing on her nose, which had zero effect. Runty didn't wake till one of its mates went over and shook him. And then I could leave.

Crows on the lawn

As we're driving toward the Big 5 in Culver City, I notice a small gathering of people--older couples walking slowly from their cars, even the younger ones deliberate, leaning in to speak to each other, pausing to put an arm on the shoulder of the man who's standing on the sidewalk near the entrance to a building. They're all in black. How often we pass the empty funeral homes, how rare to notice the grieving there on a sunny afternoon.

If I'd been closer to my family, I'd have heard about the death before I heard about today's funeral in Colorado Springs. All the grown children sang. All the daughters sang in their beautiful voices. Their mother raised doctors and teachers and musicians to sing for her when she was gone. The line of cars on the circuitous route to the Evergreen Cemetery was very long, very slow. Wind picked up the snow on the ground. There were 34 grandchildren and one great grandchild, a baby carried by his father. A dinner afterward at the church. My parents took a Honeybaked ham. Everyone takes dessert to things like this, my mother says. There's not enough of everything else. But I imagine there's more serving than eating at the wake they don't call a wake in those parts.  It's quieter. A sleeping.

Glass

Somehow, I found my way to this, a description of the glass transition phase--a window, one could say, into the physics of glass. Among the fascinating details:

"By nature, glassy materials are tricky to define. They have the disordered configuration of a liquid, but at cool temperatures they're so viscous and the molecules flow so slowly that they exhibit the brittle characteristics of a solid."

Glass, the solid, brittle liquid. Not crystalline, but disordered, and viscous. So ordinary, and so mysterious...