zirconium

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)]

We have a huge pit in our back yard that used to contain the root ball of a tree, before the March tornado knocked the tree over:



It's serving as the site of assorted weeds and wildflowers this summer. I had some old seeds that I didn't want to dedicate proper garden or container space to, so I scattered them into the pit, including a packet of poppy seeds that I vaguely recall receiving at a museum event in 2017. It was the right call: I enjoyed the few flowers I happened to see, but they weren't vibrant or numerous enough to have warranted more effort.

All the seed sheets I finally planted this year (one from a magazine, one from a condolence card, and one the card on which a gift bracelet had been mounted) have been a bust. I might start marigolds in the planter where I'd stuck the bits of bracelet-card.

A butterfly was feeding at length on the zinnias today, and I spotted a grasshopper on them yesterday. Party time!

There's so much going on. I'm about to go fall asleep in the bathtub for the second time today, so here are just two of the highlights:

Recordings from last Saturday's masterclass are now on Vimeo (I sang alto in the quartet). The full webinar (2 hours) is at https://vimeo.com/441702046/938feb78e1, and excerpts of just the class (27 minutes -- about a third of the taping) are at https://vimeo.com/441706837/2705f97cbb.

Mary Alexandra Agner's "Slipper and Shard" was published by Gingerbread House at the end of July. The line that sparked her take can be found at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/113130.html.

[Today's subject line is from Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke with You, which I encountered via a marvelous introduction by the keeper of the Read A Little Poetry blog.]

I hadn't planned on writing any full poems today -- the reasons I worked a nonstop 12-hour stretch yesterday are not yet dispatched to the land of Done -- but I do have one soon-closing-market's guidelines stored on my bookmarks bar, and when I clicked on it earlier this morning (largely in a Please Let Some Fun Prompt Park in My Head To Amuse Me While I De-skank My Kitchen Floor instead of Brain Hamster-Wheeling Ad Pointlessium Through All the Things I Have to Crank Through Tres Vite), some conversations that took place the past two days tilted into the brainpan and twined-extended-curled themselves into a new story. Eventually.

Today I also produced several batches of tomato pumpkin bao . . . .



. . . . and ran into various people from various circles in the course of wandering around my neighborhood's annual Tomato Art Fest, and inadvertently accomplished some Christmas shopping, and picked up a yard sign for my preferred vice mayor candidate (#TeamTorah) from the voter registration booth. I have also spilled sparkling wine on the gas bill, transplanted two Christmas pepper seedlings, made anchoïade (so tasty on pak choi!), boiled a potful of peanuts, and tugged at a few weeds around hollyhocks I didn't plant. (Yay for self-seeding!) I received some invitations and queries this week that have eased a bit of the ache/insecurity of not being as important to various people as I used to be (the head totally gets it -- it's not as if I stay on top of personal messages or correspondence myself -- but it has to quell the tendencies of my inner eight-year-old (and eighteen-year-old, for that matter) to grieve wholly foreseeable results and turns. I contain multitudes, and they are sometimes seriously tiresome.

But I also received a sparkly-fun six page letter from Rae today, and the BYM has been good about sending me updates from the road, and my poem "Decorating a Cake While Listening to Tennis" (text and audio) is now up at Rattle (it appeared in print earlier this summer). And, I just soaked for as long as I wanted in my tub, with the water as deep and as hot as I could make it, with a stack of magazines (mostly from my mom-in-law) and a fragrant candle (from my gal Rooo) and a box of matches with a Conan Doyle quote (from my assistant). Any one of these things would have been viewed by eight- or eighteen-year-old me as a very special treat -- and I get to enjoy them practically every day. It is wondrous to have these things, and I do not take them -- or, really, anything of comfort or convenience or connection -- for granted.

[The subject line is from Bei Dao's New Year, translated by David Hinton.]

Culling unloved photos from the drives --
blurry loaves, a squinting ex,
streaks alluding to nights that no one
else this side of the afterworld can recall,
much less light up with the lived-through-it --

my husband peers at my screen, asking
about my codes while knowing
I'm not going to make any sense.
On cue, he groans. I kiss his neck,
advise him just to call our advisor
should I get hit by a pedal tavern.

"I will," he says, "after I burn
all the pedal taverns down." "I'll do
my best not to get nailed by one." He nods
with feeling. I've seen him throw
whole albums into bins, and
t-shirts into rag-piles. I myself flung
his aunt's old clippings and ledgers
into the dumpster -- records I would
have loved to pore over, some other lifetime,
but there was no time to spare and no room
and even what I hauled back's since been further
"curated" down to what I can swear
I'll probably wear, and even then
I still have to tell myself, "Get real!
No one's going to study your dozens of drafts,
let alone save them, and that's not even
how you'd want them to spend their days, not
when the world will still need defending
from despots, not to mention
friskier frolics--" I want to be
the kind of ghost that kicks their butts
into dancing alone at the disco
should they want to dance when no one else is game
and the strength in their no when they know
they're overdue for tea with just the trees.

(FIGO Pasta, West Midtown Atlanta)

The mockingbirds
have been trilling all night

while myrtles groan
like neglected doors.

The moon shines above
the neighbor's roof

among the shreds
of party pink clouds

one more thing
not yet put away

among the snapshots
and sketches
and samples

forming my nest
of songs to be hatched

before the keyholes
kiss encroaching walls

before mortality
mandates a morning
of trowel and mortar --

old clay,
new seals.

Upper Rubber Boot prompt 18: spokesman

My copy of Jim Ottaviani's Suspended in Language is on loan to a friend, so you get this instead:



Sir Mark Oliphant, in Ann Mozley Moyal's Portraits in Science:

I was a member of a group that was led by Niels Bohr, after the test in Alamogordo, that was very much against the use of this new weapon on civilian cities. Niels Bohr, who was our spokesman -- which was a pity in some ways, because his English wasn't good and [laughs] his wife told me his Danish was almost as bad -- but he became our spokesman and was very very good and persistent in his approach.



Related:

Wikipedia's Pauli effect entry, which links to my sonnet about same

A Particular Truth--1941 - on Bohr and Heisenberg

At Teaching Resources, which obtained it via Moving Poems, which features Nic Sebastian's take as well: Othniel Smith's video remix of "Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost"

August Moon Day 7 prompt: I pull back the curtain and I see...



...a game between strangers
who see each other often
but not away
from the courts
or the parties

just as I blink
stumbling into someone
out of their Sunday best
as I exit a shower

-- yes, a fig leaf
would fool me.
My garden is thick
with saplings
so green
they would smother
an angel's sword
with all
of their wayward
veinglory.

~pld

August Moon Day 4 prompt: So I had a conversation with my shadow...



... where she asked me what kind of net
I would want to knot
cast
cradle
mend

were time no object
and money no limit



I said to her, I
am both oil and water
whip and trench
slipper and shard
caper and crutch



I'll meet you at the corner
where the wind
has been whisking
shreds of tealeaves
past the lost screws
of stray sunglasses.

~pld

a slip on the tongue...



slivers of memory:
grapefruit soda
and mellow Malbecs



time to step back
a step away away from the wreck
there being so much
to learn about breathing
before the next dive

It's a wonderful world, y'all. A bloke in Cardiff, Othniel Smith, found Nic Sebastian's reading of "Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost" at the Poetry Storehouse and was moved to make a videopoem of it:

"Playing Duets with Heisenberg’s Ghost" by Peg Duthie from OTHNIEL SMITH on Vimeo.

(Amplifying the pleasure: hearing about the video not only from Nic but from Rachel, whose d'var Torah on wrestling with angels has me thinking about how "face" and "facet" are only one letter apart; Sarah Sloat's poems at the Storehouse, which I will want to spend more time with later; and the cheap but nonetheless distinct thrill of seeing that if one Googles "Heisenberg's ghost" or "Heisenberg duets," the above video shows up first. [insert joke about Schrodingerian search results...])

In other news, the BYM's biking bestie brought breakfast to our house yesterday and (in celebration) I showed her all the spent enoxaparin syringes I'd collected in the box another friend had sent chocolates in. (Long story short: the BYM underwent surgery twice last month, which [among other things] necessitated thirty-nine anticoagulant shots, which neither he nor I ever got used to administering; the process was just as awful on day 39 as it was on day 1, especially since he had no padding on him to begin with and has since lost 10-15 pounds.) I mentioned that I had a couple of art projects in mind; the BYM furrowed his brow and made a squinchy face at me, but the bestie's face lit up, and she said, "If you don't end up doing something with them, I will." Have I said lately how much my friends delight me? :-)