Summer Scenes

You can’t escape the headlines, although it’s tempting to try. Princes Harry and William are complaining “We will never be normal.” No one will, my friends, no one will. But of course they miss it, live on the surface, look sad, straighten their ties. To give them some credit, I didn’t read past the headlines. The fate of princes and Paris, et cetera, never captured my imagination. Their stories seem like the ever present dog hair on my carpet, irritating waste, waiting to be swept away, but perhaps decent if applied as a fertilizer.

I’ve moved through Crush, past Star Dust, and into Platte River. Amazon loves me lately.

Birds – one American Goldfinch. Common, but gorgeous. The bird feeder also attracts George Cooney, a bunch of mad, tail-shaking squirrels, and towards dusk a herd of rabbits (believe me, that’s what they are.) Everything is getting so tame I imagine one day I will walk out into the yard and the animals will roll over on their backs and demand that I rub their bellies. Stranger things have happened.

Other wildlife – S. announced his house is haunted, and the ghost keeps shaking his bed. S. is taking it all well. He moves to the couch when needed. It’s not exactly a live and let live philosophy, but something along those lines. I’m taking the same approach to the bumble bee nest I uncovered off my patio. Who wants to get in the way of the pollinators, the builders? They’ve gotta do their thing. So I’m stepping around them and so far so good. No stings.

Recesses

I want it differently.

Penetralia mentis:
You say, whose heart?
Whose mind? The subject changes to
inextricable. I might mean inexorable,
but still you pull the twine. Leave it.
It goes deeper.

And still
you pull the twine.

Talking heads once in a lifetime

Back when I was a girl...

Bird Watching

Every day I go into the woods searching for the ever elusive X, never find it, and always come back with Y, in the form of muskrats, herons, abandoned fishing lures. Yesterday Y showed up in the form of Darwin, my old bird-watching friend, which was almost as good as X, but not quite. I could live with Darwin many a long day, with his daily sand walks, trying to put it all together, burning the old structures down, building new ones, and the birds, who really didn’t give a damn either way.

Various Melodies

Crush by Richard Siken came and I'm really enjoying the rhythms, the visceral nature, the whole thing. I can't even quote anything, it's all too good to choose.

The green frog made his first appearance for the season in my backyard pond last Friday. He is banjoing away, but so far has only attracted Pearl cat.

The robin is still sitting on her nest, despite winds that are swaying the tree. I wish I could do something for her, but she chose that tree.

Bird watching - one heron down by Baugo Creek.

More nature - two muskrats in the creek and some sort of small rodent-like critter rolling incoherently on the path. I tried to talk him into straightening up and running off into the woods, but he was not going for it. I said okay, but the woods is much safer for rolling around in than the path, you might get stepped on, but no one listens to me.

Picked up Gene from the airport around midnight. The interviews went well. However, whoever invented traffic circles, and then decided to put them by the airport, should be sent straight to hell. I did get in a practice run on Saturday in the daylight when I dropped him off, so I didn't screw up, but I still don't like them.

Paths - got lost in the woods, briefly, by straying from the stream, getting turned around, disoriented. Once I found my way, however, I looked around and memorized a few important trees. Amazingly enough there are a few paths I still haven't checked out in my tiny little woods.

Pears - frosted, gone, zilch. Sour cherries, ripe and ready in a week. Gene is depressed, loves pears, hates sour cherries.

Passover

(working it out slowly)

Blood still wet on the lintels,
the house slowly burns away.

Bare feet covered in ashes;
spirit perched in forest eaves.

***

There is never enough time to tell you
precisely what I mean. No, there is never enough place,

or no, I don’t know what I mean. Take this spark,
this child, you probably should have been. I am sifting

through the aroma of burned, charred remains,
the tattered fabric of genesis melded

dark beneath your skin. I have watched your hand slip inside
your collar countless days. Tell me what it means.

Do these clothes chafe you? Or does your skin
need reaffirmation every day?

***

Snags of trees moored like ghost ships
along a farmland stream.

You strike the match and light the lantern. There is a sound
like a rush of flames.

Harm and Boon in the Meetings

by Jack Gilbert

Morning Song

Gilbert trumps Garren and I am thinking about the rain and wondering if it’s really about the water. Maybe it’s about the window. Maybe it’s about the soul.

Biopersistent Vocabulary

(Concordance 1)

Accident
Accumulation
Acute
Alkylate
Animal
Appleton
Aroclor
Atmospheric
Aware
Basin
Benzene
Biodegradable
Biopersistent
Biphenyl
Bird
Birth
Blood
Business
Capacity
Capsule
Capture
Carbonless
Cheaper
Chemicals
Chlorinated
Circumstances
Clay
Cleanup
Coacervation
Coated
Collecting
Commercialize
Compatible
Compound
Concern
Confidential
Consequences
Constituents
Consumption
Contamination
Controversy
Coreactant
Danger
Data
Deaths
Degeneration
Degradable
Deposited
Detected
Detergent
Diligence
Discharge
Disintegrate
Dissolve
Disturbances
Dyes
Eagle
Ecological
Eggs
Employment
Emulsified
Environment
Experimental
Exposure
Expires
Fish
Flowing
Food
Formaldehyde
Fox River
Garden
Gelatin
Government
Grams
Gravity
Health
Human
Hydrogenated
Industry
Institute
Isopropyl
Jobs
Life
Limbo
Liver
Magnaflux
Mammal
Manufacture
Mead
Methanol
Miami River
MIPB
Molecule
Monsanto
Nature
NCR
Non-biodegradable
Odor
Oxygen
Paper
PCBs
Peregrine falcon
Permeability
Phenolic
Pigmentation
Plant
Pollutants
Polychlorinated
Pulp
Resin
Rhesus monkey
Rupture
Scientist
Sediments
Self-contained
Sickening
Skin
Solvent
Spilling
Spring
Survive
Tanks
Terphenyl
Toxic
Trenches
Vapors
Water

Biokinematics

I don’t want to misspeak.

The humanoid starts out in a normal driving position.

The occupant wants to continue going along at the speed and the trajectory that he was going until he gets redirected somehow by the structures of the vehicle.

The ejection is certainly a process. It's not an instantaneous, you're all the way in and then you're all the way out.

Okay. There's no teleporation that we know of, right?

Right. Moving in this up and out kind of scenario.

Once he separates from the vehicle, he's going to travel in a trajectory that's well defined.

The launch angle that he gets and the initial velocity and then the force – the acceleration due to gravity.

He's going to follow an arc?

He will follow a parabolic trajectory and it will be tangent to the path of travel of the vehicle.

The fact that he was able to observe the ejection certainly suggests that there was a launching going on.

Somewhere between two‑and‑one‑quarter and a two‑and‑a‑half there's a separation between the passenger and the vehicle and he goes on this trajectory.

The door was still there during that time of the roll sequence.

Did you see dicing injuries, injuries consistent with glass, consistent with him leaving through the window portal?

Evidence of a likely partial ejection kind of phenomenon, injuries sort of immediately prior to the complete ejection.

There were some attempts at respiration going on. It doesn't appear that he actually expired inside the vehicle.

His heart was still pumping?

I do not know.

You would expect to see blood somewhere.

There's nothing that I would point to in a photograph and say, look, right there, that's his ribs or something like that.

A body can certainly leave a deformation.

The place where I would expect to see the marks is going to be at the belt line.

His body has an inertia that wants to resist the rolling of this vehicle, and the thing that's going to make him roll with the vehicle and ultimately launch him out is that he's hung up on that belt line area.

He's not restrained, correct?

That's correct.

Okay. So he's up against the door in your opinion, correct?