Luis Caballero, Untitled, 1984. Mixed media on canvased paper.
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April 4, 2024: Coyotes by the Eliot House, Glyn Maxwell
Coyotes by the Eliot House
Glyn Maxwell
Tom I’ve a question and all I have is a question.
There are lots of coyotes near this old house you lived in.
I didn’t expect them here in the green Northeast.
Figured them things of rocks and the high sierras.
There goes another one bounding for the bushes.
First time, I thought: that’s a dog acting really strangely.
But it didn’t turn back for approval or get distracted
by an insignificant thing, as a dog will tend to.
No it was gone by now, it had made me nervous.
They’re the size of a family dog but they’re on their own.
Folks round here reassure me there’s no danger
unless you attack their cubs so I’ll shelve my plan
to attack their cubs, chrissakes. Tom, Tom,
apologies, I have loved my time in your house.
Last night at dinner we heard a siren wailing
off in the town and all of them started howling,
all the coyotes for miles around in the bushes
aghast, alerting their young, alarming their old,
rising and heightening, matching its pitch and power,
one near the blue spinning light in its thrall, uniquely
bound by this unpredicted visitation.
Then after the siren faded they packed it in.
What do they think that is, that demands of them
and gets of them their love or their terror or both?
What do we poets do when we know it’s nothing?
Not for them or against them or about them.
Tom, I had to be here to ask that question.
I expect I’ll have to be gone before you answer.
--
More animal poems.
More poems responding to T.S. Eliot, my problematic fave:
Waste Land Limericks, Wendy Cope
Old Women in Eliot Poems, David Wright
Today in:
2023: I Know Someone, Mary Oliver
2022: I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense, Danez Smith
2021: In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens, Molly Brodak
2020: Interesting Times, Mark Jarman
2019: The accident has occurred, Margaret Atwood
2018: Little snail, Anonymous
2017: Poem for My Son in the Car, Jennifer K. Sweeney
2016: Postcard to Baudelaire, Thomas Lux
2015: What The Dead Tell Us About Charon, Ferryman Of The Dead, Brett Ortler
2014: The Trees, Philip Larkin
2013: A Small, Soul-Colored Thing, Paisley Rekdal
2012: Last Supper, Charles Wright
2011: I Said to Poetry, Alice Walker
2010: Disgraceland, Mary Karr
2009: What To Say To A Bear, Ionna Warwick
2008: In The City of Light, Larry Levis
2007: the mockingbird, Charles Bukowski
2006: Part of Eve’s Discussion, Marie Howe
2005: I thank You God for most this amazing, e.e. cummings
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Unknown maker
Ivory Netsuke in form of rabbit grinding with mortar and pestle
1701-1900
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BIRTHDAY STORIES
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Janus la Cour (1837 - 1909) - View of a Road Winding its Way Through an Open Landscape at Dusk. 1882. Oil on canvas.
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a drawing of a canada warbler since it's starting to feel like spring in saskatchewan
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Tolai Duk Duk masks Papua New Guinea
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"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.
The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.
Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.
The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.
“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.
“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”
The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.
“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”
By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.
The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.
However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."
-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024
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New lyrics for old songs
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Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.
“Well,” said Alice, “these are a dreadfully strange assortment of objects!”
“They all symbolize different aspects of Our Lord’s martyrdom,” said the Fisher King, casting a line into his teacup.
“Indeed. I am sure everything symbolizes something else, for if everything was only itself I should be very confused. Might I ask what the point of the bleeding lance is?”
Alice regretted asking the question as soon as she had done so, for she saw the pun that would likely be made about the word point. Instead, however, the room erupted in applause and shouts of “The Grail! She has achieved the Grail!”
The next castle she visited, Alice resolved to herself as the inhabitants of this one danced for joy, would be more sensible.
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April 11, 2024: The Coffin Maker Speaks, Lisa Suhair Majaj
The Coffin Maker Speaks
Lisa Suhair Majaj
At first it was shocking—orders flooding in
faster than I could meet. I worked
through the nights, tried to ignore
the sound of planes overhead,
reverberations shaking my bones,
acid fear, the jagged weeping
of those who came to plead my services.
I focused on the saw in my hand,
burn of blisters, sweet smell of sawdust;
hoped that fatigue would push aside
my labor's purpose.
Wood fell scarce as the pile of coffins grew.
I sent my oldest son to scavenge more
but there was scant passage on the bombed out roads
And those who could make it through
brought food for the living, not planks for the dead.
So I economized, cut more carefully than ever,
reworked the extra scraps.
It helped that so many coffins were child-sized.
I built the boxes well, nailed them strong,
loaded them on the waiting trucks,
did my job but could do no more.
When they urged me to the gravesite—
that long grieving gash in earth
echoing the sky's torn warplane wound—
I turned away, busied myself with my tools.
Let others lay the shrouded forms in new-cut wood,
lower the lidded boxes one by one:
stilled row of toppled dominoes,
long line of broken teeth.
Let those who can bear it read the Fatiha
over the crushed and broken dead.
If I am to go on making coffins,
Let me sleep without knowledge.
But what sleep have we in this flattened city?
My neighbors hung white flags on their cars
as they fled. Now they lie still and cold,
waiting to occupy my boxes.
Tonight I'll pull the white sheet
from my window.
Better to save it for my shroud.
One day, insha'allah, I'll return
to woodwork for the living.
I'll build door for every home in town,
smooth and strong and solid,
that will open quickly in times of danger,
let the desperate in for shelter.
I'll use oak, cherry, anything but pine.
For now, I do my work. Come to me
and I'll build you what you need.
Tell me the dimensions, the height or weight,
and I'll meet your specifications.
But keep the names and ages to yourself.
Already my dreams are jagged
Let me not wake splintered from my sleep
crying for Fatima, Rafik, Soha, Hassan, Dalia,
or smoothing a newborn newdead infant's face.
Later I too will weep. But if you wish me
to house the homeless dead,
let me keep my nightmares nameless.
--
Today in:
2023: Running Orders, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
2022: April, Alex Dimitrov
2021: Dust, Dorianne Laux
2020: VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God, Mary Karr
2019: What I Didn’t Know Before, Ada Limón
2018: History, Jennifer Michael Hecht
2017: from Correspondences, Anne Michaels
2016: Mesilla, Carrie Fountain
2015: Dolores Park, Keetje Kuipers
2014: Finally April and the Birds Are Falling Out of the Air with Joy, Anne Carson
2013: The Flames, Kate Llewellyn
2012: To See My Mother, Sharon Olds
2011: Across a Great Wilderness without You, Keetje Kuipers
2010: Poem About Morning, William Meredith
2009: Death, The Last Visit, Marie Howe
2008: Animals, Frank O’Hara
2007: Johnny Cash in the Afterlife, Bronwen Densmore
2006: Anne Hathaway, Carol Ann Duffy
2005: Sleep Positions, Lola Haskins
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When people come to my town, they seem to assume that the Great Magnet is a metaphor, or a tourist trap at worst. I can assure you, dear reader, that it is neither. For reasons unknown to me, our town forefathers – and one foremother who tried to pull out of the project when she figured out which way the wind was blowing – built a really big electromagnet in the centre of town. And then they realized that there was no way to power it on.
For hundreds of years, it has sat immobile as Town Hall was built around it, just daring someone to devise a power supply stronger than those they had available in 1802. Sure, a lot of fancy-pants industrial designers tried to get the eight-storey-tall electromagnet removed. It clashed with their vision for the productive space. Thing is, the town's founding laws say "no touchy the magnet," so they couldn't do much about the magnet. The magnet, that is, and its massive copper lugs sticking out the back, begging for a little bit of hot sauce.
Now, even without electricity, a chunk of ferrous material this large has some strange effects. The weather around it is really cold, and occasionally seagulls will loop infinitely around it until they drop from exhaustion, their internal sense of navigation disrupted by some passing force that has coupled into the magnet and gently charged its field. During the town Egg Festival, you could occasionally hear the AM radio Community Events Cruiser's broadcast through its surface, until Shopkeeper Ted drunkenly touched the surface of the Great Magnet and was instantly reduced to ash.
We'll switch it on one day, we tell each other. Big nuclear plant just opened a few towns over, that's got enough beef to spin it up. And then we look around at all the cool shit we own that's made out of metal, more than there ever was over 200 years ago. We think about all the things we have to lose.
Sometimes, on the Magnet's annual anniversary night speech, The Mayor will sometimes try to scare us with the size of the power bill, the magnitude of our tax dollars, that it would take to let 'er rip, just this once, as if the spectre of a few bucks a month extra would discourage us further from turning on a machine that would cleave the world in half.
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Human oddities, or Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing. Persia ~ ca.1600 Wellcome Library London
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Buellia vernicoma
Once upon a time, some lichen samples from North America were sent to a lichenologist in Europe. There was one small rock that had 2 different crustose lichen species on it, and the American lichenologist (Tuckerman) labeled the sample with name of the smaller of the two (B. vernicoma) with a penciled in arrow pointing to it. But the European scientist (Nylander) didn't notice the arrow, and thought that the American scientist was referring to the larger lichen present on the rock of B. vernicoma. Nylander recognized this species as Lecidea myriocarpella, and came to the conclusion that what the American lichenologists were calling B. vernicoma and what European scientists where calling L. myriocarpella must be the same thing. He synonymized the names, and from then on it was thought that B. vernicoma was present in Europe. It wasn't until 1999 that Anders Nordin, a Swedish lichenologist, realized that the reason that B. vernicoma had never been collected in Europe was because it truly wasn't there, and managed to track down the source of the error. For centuries we thought B. vernicoma was in Europe when it never was, all because of a small communication error. And what of the European L. myriocarpella? Well when folks believed it was the same as a more common North American species, no one really bothered to keep track of it, and so very little is known about it to this day. So whenever you get annoyed having to clarify yourself in an email, remember how lucky we are to live in an age where miscommunication can be remedied in such a short amount of time.
images: source | source
info: source | source
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that post thats like this is the reading order for discworld is WRONG first you read the first one you find in a second-hand shop or local library. then you read going postal. after that youre on your own
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Oleksandr Murashko (Ukrainian, 1875-1919)
Annunciation, ca. 1907
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