first
into the glass airlock
through double doors
that help you push them
open, pause at their widest
collapse emphatically
resisting interruption
if your rhythm is wrong

then
the second double doors
inert and flimsy, no will
in the shadow of
the first.

then
hip high metal flippers
make me a pinball
ricocheting right
across the reading room
through clicking wooden door
into invisible library parts still quiet
when the phones stop ringing.

tuesday
in the airlock
a tiger swallowtail still
on the flat flush floor
sill of plate glass
surveying brick
behind a tree in a pot
beside a cardboard death trap

how do i see these things?
why must i notice
the hatchling in the leaves
the beetle struggling beneath bananas
the steel blue feather in the grass
the abyss in the eyes of strangers?

i walk alone, quiet, and look
i see more than most
i think
yet
i can’t fathom all the wonders
i do not see
despite looking

sometimes
i try to keep walking
leave the feather on the ground
do not carry the cicada
from the brick walk to the tree
do not tuck another fallen leaf
between the leaves of your calendar
but it is painful not to stop
not to treasure
not to honor
not to try

before
i make it to my desk
i know i will
drop my bags
power on the computer
turn around
out the clacking door
across the reading room
between the scanning sentinels
out the flat doors
into the violent heat

then
around around and back
airlock again
rustle behind the potted trees
the circulation desk
must think i’m touched

but
i touch you
tentative
your wing flaps up
and i had imagined
you were probably dead

so
careful careful
must get you outside
careful, touch thorax
touch abdomen
careful, touch not your wings

through flimsy doors
through flippers
ricochet left
wondering
at your strength in my hand
your wings slowly beat
why we walk around in circles
locks and one way doors

careful careful
please do not fly
not in the library
it houses a different kind of life
another kind of beauty

careful careful
just a moment more

see
i’m frightened
of trying to help
scared
i might instead harm

careful
through the flat doors
outside
where you belong
swallowtail, meet shrub

but
something
is wrong and sticky
your hindlegs tangled
in what might
or might not
be cobwebs

i pull the tacky mass
gentle
but my body betrays me
the more i need precision
the more
my heart pounds
my hands shake

hopeful i am not hurting you
afraid to pull the cobwebby clump

(can you even imagine
tearing the legs from a butterfly?

i can imagine why i have been
finding cicadas crushed
into concrete or brick
campus is full of students
now

and
i hope
but doubt
their steps
are accidents)

your wings beat faster
when i pull
do i project your fear?
pain?
your insect wild
need to flee?
i can’t hold you
can’t pull harder
you take flight

first
you struggle
so do i
apprehending the possibility
of watching you fall

then
you find
your rhythm

now
ascending black
against clear hot sky
ropy burden dangling behind

now
all that exists is you
flitting up
up higher
high into the blue
higher than i knew
even unburdened
papillons could fly

then
you are gone
behind roof line
out of sight

i am shaken
shaking i failed to save you
released you into danger
with a sticky weight
a mark upon you
dragging you down to
certain and soon
death

again
through the willful doors
the airlock, flimsy doors, flippers
fighting disappointment
fear of tears
or moistness of eyes
of people saying
once again
too sensitive, silly
crying over butterflies
or birds hit by cars
everything dies

but
taking flight
is freedom
is hope
spying a startled bird
alighting directly into steel destruction
is perverse

a butterfly
climbing
up and away
towing its sticky demise:
the same

like this
to office, to cube
to work, to meeting
to prepare
for disaster

emergency comes in flavors:
fire
wind
buildings collapsing to earth
security
which means a human with a gun
or two or four

amid this
listening, talking
planning, debate
subsides
the ache in my chest
behind my eyes

later
the sadness finds me again
and i wonder
why is it
contingencies of human evil
distract from the centered ache
and
what it means
that this is so
and
how many ways exist
of being a traitor
to your own kind

* I haven’t claimed to be a poet in over 13 years, but some things just want to come out in fragments and images and this is one of them. An unpolished unrevised ramble.

Seen:
- Big black cat with yellow eyes watching me from atop a car in the parking deck
- Nest on the ground, falling apart. I had nothing in which to carry it and it looked like squirrel had rooted around in it anyway.
- At least 5 cicadas squished to smithereens on sidewalks. Number of these seen previous to return of students for Fall semester: 0.

Received:
- One red egg filled with the philosopher’s stone

Noted:
- The dead tree looming over my house from across the street has finally been cut down. Given the distribution of twigs and pieces of branches scattered by the removal, it is a damned good thing they cut it down before it fell.

Did not want:
- Cats yowling outside at 5:30am causing two of the cats in my bedroom to freak out and have a rolling-around, screaming-in-that-creepy-(and really loud)-cat-fighting way.
- My cell phone to have been automatically set one hour late for at least 3 hours Tuesday morning, including the time I normally wake up. The effect was that my cell phone alarm went off at 8:15 (so it displayed) but the rest of the clocks read 9:15.

Enjoyed:
- Writing a quick script to save a colleague a whole lot of time and tedious work.
- Last night’s class session on cataloging in context and FRBR.

Astounded:
- That it is September already.

Wishing for:
- Rain

Experienced:
- Monday night, depersonalization/derealization episode of unsettling strength and duration. Also file under “Did not want,” but here’s to knowledge and intact reality testing.
- Kensho-esque span of some amount of time upon ascending the stairs of the parking deck to open expanse of night sky Tuesday night.
- Intense head pain for an hour and a half last night.

These three things might not be unrelated.

Early webworm instar

Yesterday I tore out all the nests I could reach with a rake. This is the first time I’ve seen these guys since I’ve lived here. Since “the pupae over-winter in cocoons in the ground. Pupae may also be found under loose bark and in leaf litter,” I’m going to blame this infestation on the nasty, ugly mulch with which the landscapers covered the area between my front walk and street last winter, killing the lovely moss that was growing there.

In addition to killing the moss and (likely) introducing webworms to my trees, the mulch looks like a tree-eating dinosaur vomited in front of my house. It is so much uglier than whatever they thought needed fixing. They also planted several bushes in the area, all of which have died. Ugh.

In addition to battling webworms, yesterday I also cleaned and refilled the back birdfeeder, cleared leaves from my (hopefully one day) moss garden, started a compost pile, began creating a brushpile for wildlife behind my house, and arranged some things to try to mitigate the erosion due to lack of downspouts on the corners of my front porch. What I would really like are some rain chains. And to create a dry streambed to shunt the runoff around the driveway to the sunny part of the slope where I could put a rain garden. But I run away with myself…

Today’s work excitement: cataloging research blitz, at which I was a “blitzer” who “blitzed” on the topic of our e-book cataloging coverage and what SerialsSolutions ebook MARC service has added.

Tomorrow’s work excitement: emergency response walkthrough. I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds exciting. I’m sure it will be less exciting than it sounds, though.

This does not include any of the Egyptian bird-headed gods or shamanic bird masks/cloaks/headdresses.

Page from Bittersweet Dreamsyrup for Melancholics, by Henrik Drescher

Chick-man?

Bird-man by Clive Barker

Bird-man street art

Bird-man rock painting, Easter Island

Anzu, Zu, or Imdugud: Sumerian Bird-Man

Bird-man of Lascaux

Tangata manu paintings

Maori wood carving

Toltec fresco

Garuda, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand

Pre-Columbian bird-man

Owl-man, unsourced

Aboriginal drawings at Eagles Ranch, Australia

Nazca line bird-figure, Peru

Neo-Assyrian bird-headed god from Nimrud

Sirens seducing Odysseus

Pre-dynastic terracotta Egyptian goddess

And that’s not touching Horus, Thoth, etc…

Tuesday I got thrown for a loop when students started emailing me wondering why the website for the online course they’d registered for didn’t seem to exist. Well, that would be because I signed a piece of paper saying I’d teach a face to face class on Wednesday nights. There were a lot of personnel changes going on in the department, so I’ll chalk it up to that. I regret that some students had to drop the class, but you really just can’t pull an online course out of your ear on -1 day’s notice.

The course format announcement didn’t get made until Wednesday. I spent all day at work that day, yet put 0 hours on my timesheet because the entire day was spent putting out class-related fires. That’s ok, because I’ve banked over 50 hours of “in case” time off that needs to be used up before I either get replaced or hired. But personnel did call and ask me for my references.

If I get hired, I’m buying myself a bicycle and a new vacuum cleaner. It is highly unsatisfying to vacuum when you can feel the machine spitting stuff out on your toes as you walk behind it.

Class itself was fun, though I’m not used to standing up for 2.5 hours straight any more and it reactivated my lower back pain. Lordosis doesn’t do well with standing around, and I get distracted enough in the classroom without pacing. A lot of stretching has been in order.

I’ve been trying to get more sleep, as I was averaging about 6 hours a night there for a good while. The frustrating thing is that after 7-8 hours, it is much harder to wake up and maintain focus through the day. I think perhaps I really need 9 or more hours (which just isn’t going to happen until my dissertation is complete), and stopping at 6 interrupts the sleep cycle at a point more amenable to waking.

I forget the days now, but there were Treasures to Report.

A mockingbird feather found. A pigeon feeding its babies. Flitting dragonflies. The full moon peeking out from behind layers of clouds. Enough life in the air that it is possible to believe there might ever be a chill again. Butterflies moving on to different bushes with small purple flowers. A little girl climbing a tree more bravely than any of the little boys. A resurgence of local blueberries. Falling asleep with the windows open to the sound of cicadas, crickets, and frogs. Goldfinches at my backyard feeder. Tiny fuzzy white caterpillar with black eye spots.

A sad thing is that I can no longer smell the oaks in McCorkle place because there is always too much nasty Axe body spray/Bath and Body Works hideous synthetic nose burning miasma lingering from the bodies of undergraduates.

A good thing is the word miasma.

The return of the undergrads is always a good exercise in remembering just how much farther there is to go in being equanimous and opening in love to every moment. You’re not really suffused with loving-kindness when you feel like clocking someone in the head with your parasol. The alternative is to really look at them and take them in, which can be overwhelming because the vast, vast majority have so much pain or fear or emptiness about them and yet they are trying so hard to project otherwise. Of course you can really say that about any group of people almost anywhere, no?

Stopped by Weaver Street Market on the way home tonight to hang out with a friend a bit. Had a nice pint of stout. It’s been quite a while since I’ve just enjoyed a nice pint.

And now the cleaning fluid has soaked in long enough and it is time to finish cleaning up after the cats in preparation for my own private dance party. These events have the best DJ ever.

Not much else, as I think my cats were somehow feeding me sedatives in my sleep and it was all I could do to walk in today.

A sickeningly thick and strong strand of spider’s silk caught me.

1-5-0 is back open with real food for lunches. With biodegradable forks, even. This is a very happy thing, as I was tired of their tofu wrap and bean salad (and Weaver Street’s vegan chicken salad wrap) and have pretty much given up on keeping myself fed beyond fresh juice, fruit, and frozen Indian entrees.

And then utter chaos erupted and I’m going to try to sleep in spite of it. Tomorrow will be a day. Wonderful things could happen.

Two feathers.

Smaller, rounded-winged butterflies in the SILS garden hedge, and fuzzy bee bums.

The fountain in fast-forward, the most exuberant droplets less hesitant than usual.

Surprising rain in the afternoon. The smell of wet bricks.

A very large black bird swooping over the highway.

An old bumper sticker that read, “I     my      ,” because the red was faded

Yesterday: the most perfect acorn.

Our world goes to pieces, we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our “right” or “wrong,” the absolute of our inner voice—we still know beauty, freedom, happiness… unexplained and unquestioned.

Intuition saves us examination.

——

Art work deals with the problem of a piece of art, but more, it teaches the process of all creating, the shaping out of the shapeless. We learn from it, that no picture exists before it is done, no form before it is shaped. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it, and no imagination is great enough to know before they are done what they will be like.

We come to know in art work that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision; that we are led, in going along, by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, a shorthand of material and its treatment, but the finished work is still a surprise. We learn to listen to voices: to the yes or no of our material, our tools, our time. We come to know that only when we feel guided by them our work takes on form and meaning, that we are misled when we follow only our will. All great deeds have been achieved under a sense of guidance.

We learn courage from art work. We have to go where no one was before us. We are alone and we are responsible for our actions. Our solitariness takes on religious character. This is a matter of my conscience and me.

——

We learn to trust our intuition. No explaining and no analyzing can help us recognize an art problem or solve it, if thinking is our only relation to it. We have to rely on inner awareness. We can develop awareness, and clear thoughts may help us cultivate it, but the essence of understanding art is more immediate than any thinking about it.

1. published in Design 46, no. 4 (December 1944): 21–22

Halloween will be here before I know it. Perhaps I should set a goal of finishing Mr. Skelly, my felted skeleton, before it arrives.

Mr. Skelly

Or maybe I should work on my dissertation instead. Sigh.

And no, I am not searching for a wedding dress. Random find from a red treasury. This listing by the same seller caught my eye at small size.

From the same seller… I will have nightmares about this one:

Too much magick

1. Now I want cake.
2. Don’t get me started.