Venus, ball of gas
hostile to all living things
sends pinpricks of joy
shivering through my mornings
hundreds of millions of miles.
Venus, ball of gas
hostile to all living things
sends pinpricks of joy
shivering through my mornings
hundreds of millions of miles.
Posted at 07:45 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
I was foolish to think that poetry
could save me, save anyone. Certainly
not the birds or the ginkgo trees. I bought
a happy light, though. That's not even
a euphemism, that's the brand name.
So you can buy happiness after all, as long
as you sit in front of it twenty minutes
a day, 6 to 24 inches from your face
(but don't look right into it; even too
much happiness is bad for you).
A man told me once he only dated much younger
women because they weren't so cynical about
love. I didn't bother to tell him that it was of course
men like him that made them that way. But why
try and change your behavior when you can just
trade it all in for a new model? Everything's disposable,
even the spiders have gone back into hiding.
There are as many squirrels flat on the road
as running along the top of the backyard fence
and the ubiquitous deer, god they are annoying
the way they have adapted so well to this town,
better than I have, munching the flowers from
everyone's yard, the leaves from the trees, grass,
the yellow tops of dandelions.
My future as an impoverished old lady gives me
a sideways grin and shrugs. Still better than
the future you left for your son, admit it, still
better than that.
Posted at 07:37 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
of the Paris Agreement begins. The author teams selected from these lists will build an a Assessment, around the outlines agreed for the three Working Group contributions in September. Working Group I will cover observations, of the changing state of the climate system, an assessment of human influence, near-term predictability and scenario-based projections, of future changes. It will assess how the climate system responds to perturbations, including the global cycles of energy, water and carbon, short-lived climate forces, and sea level change. The Working Group I report will emphasize climate information relevant for regional impact and risk assessment, including extreme. events. Working Group II will assess the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of h Humans, and their diverse societies, cultures, and settlements. It will consider their vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of these natural and human systems to adapt to climate change, now and in the future, and so reduce climate-associated risks. The Working Group II report will also present options for creating a sustainable future for all through
an equitable and integrated approach to mitigation and adaptation efforts at all scales,. Working Group III builds on the Fifth Assessment Report through three innovations. - 2 - It will strengthen links between long-term global, perspectives such as the long-term temperature goal and more immediate policy and investment needs. Separate but linked.. chapters on long-term and short-medium term futures support this approach. It will Draw on a wider range of scientific disciplines shedding light on human behaviour and its link to climate change. It will set climate mitigation firmly in the context of sustainable development through introductory and synthesis chapters framing the report. It will strengthen links between long-term global perspectives such as the long-term temperature goal and more immediate policy and investment needs. Separate but linked chapters on long-term and short-medium term Futures support this approach. It will draw on a wider range of scientific disciplines shedding light on human behaviour and its link to climate change. It will set climate mitigation firmly in the context of sustainable development through introductory. and synthesis chapters framing the report.
Posted at 19:51 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
She cuts off his head. His head is full of luxuriant curls not unlike Medusa's snakes. She can feel the air on her nipples as she pulls the blade from its scabbard. It is heavy and all the world gleams along its edge. She will cleave the head off the body which she might be doing simply for the pleasure of his absence. She can feel the warm blood on her, a new skin as it dries.
She looks likes ecstasy. She shimmers. Her lips are parted. She bathes in gold like a halo, like the Madonna and Christ, except there's no baby, only a dead man's head, small in the corner. He is also painted sensually, his lips are pale but full. Her fingers are buried in his curls. She swings it, the weight of it a comfort, the blood painting everything around it. There is no blood in the painting. Only gold, shimmering, only Judith's half closed eyes, only her clothes of fractured light and jewels, her face as pale as his.
Posted at 11:52 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
now the moon, large and pale
bland, familiar, implacable
how did we come to think
the world was ours for the taking
and all the other worlds
like disposable razors
Posted at 20:40 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
Dark clouds across the morning sky,
the Doug fir barely discernible,
Venus nowhere to be found, her
sparkle obscured by circumstance
and there's your poetic metaphor right
there. Do with it what you will.
We can believe whatever we choose
to and where's the sacrifice in that?
I have created gods and goddesses
when looking for a parking place,
who's to say what needs spark
deities and what deities find solace
inside of someone's ragged breath.
There's always dust accumulating:
your dead skin and hair. When
I discovered everybody has
colonies of microscopic mites
living in their eyebrows, I said
except for me. Because how do
you keep it together after that?
Better to delude yourself, of
course. The beams in your eyes
are the only things keeping you
sane. Well, that plus your addictions
which you merely think of as habits,
some of them even kind of healthy, anti-
oxidants and a clear mind, who
could doubt the sanctity of that?
It's not like you're shooting up
drugs or a shopping mall
it's not like you're hurting anyone
(yourself? bah!) better to
have faith in some distant
haven, some comforting afterlife
than this parasitic existence, even
the softest among us realizes this
and those of us left behind
after the rapture, after the migration after
the extinction of each sweet breath
what will we invent to give ourselves one more step along the path?
Posted at 18:42 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
[I'm going to cheat a bit today and post something I wrote in July.]
To move quickly like a lizard on a whitewashed
wall. To not care which way is up. To eat
crumbs off the concrete floor brushing soft
snout against cool surface, searching.
To be invited to sit at the table and then expected to clean
it. To be the wrinkle in a vinyl seat
when a woman leaves it rising quickly. To be an accident
born during the Great Depression ordering
endless brown boxes brought by endless brown
trucks and men who bear no resentment.
To walk the frigid salty shallows blue with ache
and eelgrass tangled, swayed by the entering
river, lacking a beak that could catch a fish
or anything, really, that might sustain you.
Posted at 19:07 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
Even in the storm, Venus rising behind the tall Doug fir across the street and it's a small thing to hold onto, one distant planet, reflecting sunlight: evidence of the long game, indifference, physics and a receptacle for all the meaning we want to project onto it.
but I'll take whatever I can get right now
Being happy is a choice, they say, but how many things are you addicted to in your happiness? What are you willing to go without? How long does it take you to hollow out your kneecap with a spoon?
For all her worrying, my mother couldn't protect us. I don't think her mother even tried. To this day when she sees an old man and a granddaughter, she shivers and swallows hard.
so yes, the morning sky and every cliched metaphor you want to throw at it
I'll take it, I'll take it all
Posted at 06:54 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Seattle Symphony wants me back.
The violins are pining for me, the bassoons
haven't played in tune since I left, and the cymbal,
well the cymbal refuses to be polished, much less banged
together with its mate. The conductor is distracted
by his side project with that string quartet
and the french horn isn't about to have anybody's hand
up its bell. The cellos no longer look
like the torsos of women that men want
to wrap their arms around seductively
and all the reeds for the clarinets
have split and splintered. The pads
of the saxophone keys have rotted
and shrunk and the flutes keep rolling their lip
plates away from the lips of the flutists.
The skin of the timpani won't tighten or tune,
all the hammers have fallen off
one by one and are languishing in the belly
of the baby grand. Birds are nesting
in the organ pipes, nobody knows what the hell
happened to the violas. The triangle has come
completely unbent. Soon spiders will be
building webs between music stands
and waiting patiently in the centers,
exhausted and hungry, oblivious to
anything that doesn't struggle in the sticky silk.
.
Posted at 20:21 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
Venus again, impossibly bright in the pink-brushed morning.
Goddess of love smile down upon me now in the dark days of November,
take away the trickle of despair, runoff from the frozen lake of my heart.
Change me into a nuthatch, let me forage and fly, free me from
this primate body: loud, lustful, destructive, put together with joints
that no longer fold or function properly. Dragonfly larvae molt
eighteen times before they even leave the water, and here I sit
with the same skin I've always had, stretched and scrubbed, folding
in on itself, sprouting hair. It's not even that it's too late: it is.
It's not even that we can't save our own children: we can't. It's that
we know we are guilty, that we were too hungry, and no matter how
far we walk on our knees, no matter how perfect our contrition,
there is nothing left to bless us and send us on our way.
Posted at 07:19 in November 30/30, poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)