My students freeze—
how out of place
that slope-intercept
equation on the whiteboard
in this literature class.
Scrawled in blue, graphed
and correctly worked.
It’s poetry, I tell them.
by James Brush
Author: James Brush
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Two of my poems are up over at Carcinogenic Poetry. They are “I-10 Eastbound” and “Miles (Never Once Imagined).” I’m excited because Carcinogenic and its parent Virgogray Press are based here in Austin. Go check them out and look around while you’re there.
Last week someone from the LA Times asked to interview me about the Lost book club project I’ve been doing on this blog for the past few years. The article is here, and she even included some of my theorizin’ about where the show might be headed in these last 2 episodes.
I’ll be coming up with a final theory after the next episode and have it up in time for the series finale. As much as I like trying to predict Lost, though, I really love it when I’m wrong if only so I’ll be more surprised by how things play out.
If you’re one of the many people suddenly showing up here today, welcome and thanks for coming by. My Lost reading is only a minor part of this site so I hope you’ll have a look around while you’re here.
I’ll be hosting the 126th edition of the blog carnival I and the Bird right here at Coyote Mercury on May 27th. I and the Bird seeks posts focused on encounters with birds so it’s pretty open in terms of what you send: stories, observations, essays, photos, poetry. It just needs to be something about birds that you’ve recently posted on your blog. You can send me a link at j_brush (at) coyotemercury (dot) com or use the contact form. The deadline is May 25th.
If you want more about I and the Bird, visit 10000 Birds for the full guidelines or drop by Twin Cities Naturalist to enjoy IATB #125 hosted by Kirk Mona.
Now, send those links and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
I slammed on my brakes when I saw the painted bunting. I’ve never seen such a bird, but I knew what it was immediately, so unmistakeable are these little guys. After he flew into the brush along the road to the Pond 2 blind at Hornsby Bend, I could have easily convinced myself I hadn’t see him.
I stopped the car and scanned the brush with my binoculars and found him perched on a swaying branch. I remembered I had my camera and started shooting, wishing I had run my car through the wash since I didn’t want to open the window and spook him. I took a lot of blurry shots and two or three in which you can’t even discern a bird, but I think you can see Big Foot. Somehow, the one above came out.
I could have gone home then, full of one little bird wearing his beauty so casually, or stayed in that spot watching him until dark, but eventually he flew off and I continued down to the blind to see what was on the ponds.
Most of the winter waterfowl have left Hornsby, though I did see a pair of blue-winged teals a couple of northern shovelers still hanging around. The long-legged waders of summer hadn’t arrived so I decided to wander down the river trail.
The birds were a little more secretive than usual on the river trail, but where the birds were hiding, the butterflies were out like I’ve never seen. We had a cool, wet winter and early spring and thus our wildflowers have been spectacular beyond what I’m used to and I suspect that’s led to this explosion of butterflies. Walking along the trails, watching the ground to avoid surprising rattlesnakes, my peripheral vision filled with the flickering colors of butterflies giving me the impression I was being followed, which I was, in so far as butterflies follow people.
Summer is coming quickly and the temperature started creeping into the mid-nineties so I decided to head back up to the ponds and on to the rest of my day.
Across one of the ponds, I could see a lot of black-necked stilts in the mudflats, and closer in there were grackles, killdeer and this lesser yellowlegs; at least I’m pretty sure it’s a lesser and not a greater yellowlegs mainly because he was a little smaller than the killdeer who came around and stood next to him long enough for me to get a few lousy shots. The killdeer and the lesser yellowlegs are listed as the same size in my guidebooks so I’m guessing this is a lesser.
And then, it was time to go. On the way out, I saw bank, cliff and cave swallows, scissor-tailed flycatchers, and even a pair of eastern kingbirds, which with the painted bunting was my second life bird for the day.
I think I’ve seen at least one (usually more) life bird every time I’ve ever been to Hornsby Bend. It always amazes me how once I’ve seen a new bird I start seeing it more frequently. Perhaps, to see a new bird is to learn how to see it and so my eyes and mind are open to it in the future. Over time I see smaller, better, slower and more.
Lesser Yellowlegs
Update: This post is included in I and the Bird #125 at Twin Cities Naturalist. Check it out.
Elegant and graceful, forever young
under the lights, but up close her legs
were scarred like cottage cheese, her eyes
had bathtub rings. She twirled the years
inside the cage, spinning them away
like someone else’s dreams. Backstage
she showed us off: tiger, leopard & me,
toothless cougar rescued from a meth dealer.
We rumbled like idling engines while
she ruffled our fur, loving all of us
as she did her own children, loving us
even as we tore her and her son apart.
—
This one took a decidedly dark turn, and it’s based on a true story. My father-in-law used to coordinate a Shrine circus. We went and got to go backstage to meet the woman who worked with the big cats. She was much older in person than she looked onstage. The cats were beautiful, and she clearly loved them and took good care of them. We weren’t allowed to touch them, but seeing them up close even inside their kennels was enough to set some primal adrenaline sparking. A few years later we learned that the cats killed the woman and her son.
This is a response to the very first prompt over at the brand new Big Tent Poetry where I’m honored to be a barker and to have had one of my posts included in the 3rd ring of that exciting poetry circus. The prompt, in honor of the site’s circus theme, was to write a persona poem ideally about someone associated with the circus. I chose the cats who I can’t blame. It’s what they do. We often wonder if our sweet cat would eat us if he were big enough. I suspect he would.
I’ve got 2 prose poems up at Poem2day. They are “Portsmouth, 1988” and “Newport, 1990.” Go have a read and while you’re at it, check out “River Water” by Angie Werren, which is also there and how I learned about the site, so h/t Angie.
There’s a blog post, one that made me laugh silly, of George & Amy’s greyhounds Giving a T. I’ve smiled thinking of it occasionally over the past 4 years, and I’ve been following Nigel and Mookie (and George & Amy’s blogs) ever since. Yesterday, they had to let Mookie go, the most painful and loving thing we can do for our animals when that time comes.
The internet is slower place today. Rest in peace, Mookie.
Sometimes details can hang up a whole story; for instance, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, I could never quite get past the fact that the unnamed narrator, the underground man, was a retired civil servant looking back over his life from the vantage point of forty. I’ll turn forty this year and don’t feel the slightest bit old or ready for retirement, though such is one of the big differences between living in St. Petersburg, Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and living in the United States in the early twenty-first.
The underground man’s life goes something like this: I’m superior, more refined, more aware of lofty ideals and beauty than my contemporaries and peers. Because of this they are not worthy of my time and attention, yet I need these people I loath to accept me. I’m humiliated by my need for acceptance and so I attempt to show I am better than them by humiliating them, but I lack the courage to do even this and so I make myself feel better by hating them, yet I crave their acceptance all the more. It goes round and round leaving me trapped in my hole like a mouse underground.
But I kept thinking… you’re only forty, man, you’re still young, get over it. Still, there’s real psychological truth to Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the man, unable to change and therefore stuck in the circular thinking that his moral superiority over everyone in his life is the cause of his debasement which in turn causes that sense of superiority. It’s a kind of hell, really, and the circular nature of hell is a recurring motif on Lost, a concept first introduced to Lost with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (back in Season 2):
Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.
And that is a perfect description of the underground man. Despite any amount of free will he may have, he’s trapped by his ego in a hell of his own making from which he’ll never escape. Of course that not escaping and instead choosing, against reason, a path that leads to destruction is exactly what the underground man is doing in order to prove his theory that human nature is to exercise free will even against the interests of oneself. In essence we can, and often do chose to destroy ourselves against all reason and opportunity to do otherwise.
So we make our own hells and dig our own graves. Isn’t that one of the themes of Lost, which constantly reinforces the notion that the characters’ exercise of free will has created the destinies from which they can’t seem to escape? Isn’t it the stubborn pride of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid and Ben that forces them to continue on paths they know to be unreasonable? Who on Lost can actually break out of his self-created destiny? Will that person be the candidate to replace Jacob?
In Lost, Notes from Underground appears in the Season 6 episode “Everybody Loves Hugo.” Hurley finds it among Ilana’s things after she accidently blows herself up. I didn’t see it pertaining to one individual character or storyline in that episode so much as it reminds me of the whole situation on Lost, in which each of the characters is trapped by his or her own weaknesses. It makes me wonder if anyone on this show is going to find a happy ending and some kind of redemption or if they will all, like the underground man, wither away in their holes, forgotten by an uncaring world.
Or maybe they’ll end up on the bottom of the ocean as hinted in the Season 6 opener wherein the island was shown on the bottom of the Pacific. Perhaps one or more of our characters is doomed to become an underwater man before this is all over.
Notes from Underground is the second Dostoyevsky novel to appear on Lost, the first being The Brothers Karamazov back in Season 2, and it’s a tough book to enjoy, though it is good. Whatever that means.
Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost book club posts.
Back in the days before digital photography, people sometimes asked why I write poetry (or anything else for that matter). My answer was usually something along the lines of “Because film is too expensive.” That was partially true, I suppose, and also a flippant way of not having to admit to being, you know, a poet. But nowadays pixels are cheap and still, I write.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks of doing the NaPoWriMo poem-a-day-for-thirty-days thing, and that’s got me thinking about practice and product. Thinking about practices that require craft and some degree of clarity reminds me of the way Robert Pirsig describes working on his bike in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wherein he writes that the cycle you’re working on is you.
One of the many joys of writing is the way it facilitates discovery, leading somewhere unexpected, to some insight I didn’t even realize I was looking for. In this way, writing poetry is as much and maybe more of a practice than it is a chase for a completed product. It is a way to see the world under the light of a different sun and then perhaps to understand this thing called life in new and unexpected ways.
Practice isn’t everything, though, because I’m not writing just for me. I like the connection between myself and those who read what I write, and I enjoy the creation of the thing. My about page says “I’m driven to create,” which is true, though I prefer Dale’s way of expressing it as a need to make and share beautiful things because that’s a truer way of putting it, and it encompasses the way time spent in the kitchen can satisfy that need too.
What I like about making poems—about writing, really—is that process of discovery and feeling of channeling things from somewhere else that I then share with others. When I go back and read something I’ve written that’s actually good and brings me or someone else enjoyment, my initial response is always “Wow, who wrote that?” Maybe I should ask “Where did that come from?” but either way, the answer is I don’t know, and that mystery is a reminder to remain open, which is where I fell out with NaPoWriMo: it upends the balance and turns poetry into a mad quest for product.
I have cranked out 46 poems (25 micro-poems posted at a gnarled oak and 21 longer poems posted here at Coyote Mercury) this April and I haven’t had time to process more than a few of them. I like to write, think and revise, but NaPoWriMo dispenses with the last two in its demand for numbers. So I’m glad it’s over.
For me to write anything worthwhile, I need to remain open to the world and to experience. The time spent not writing is just as important as the writing, I suppose. Still, I completed the challenge (because I’m obsessive) and now, I’m looking forward to going back to my nice slow poem-or-two-a-week pace, getting back to my balance between practice and product, and also just walking around, seeing, and trying to pay attention to the world around me, which is where it all begins.