31 diciembre 2012

49ers in the playoffs

the Giants not

Miss Vee & other mysteries kept me awake

tea on the screen porch

in town a donkey brays

the waning moon

Ana tells me I’ll have my own two llamas on the trek

“lozened over with silver twiste” [Barbara Guest, Quilts]: in the figure of a diamond or rhomb

rhomb[us]: a parallelogram with four equal sides

from Barbara Guest’s Quilts (1980):

Once you start looking at real

mushrooms

you see art everywhere

Gabrielle Calvocoressi [pic courtesy of We Represent the 47 Percent]

from Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing (2009):

A Love Supreme

Breathless in the backwoods,

backlit by what joy could hold you,

I see you, naked as stripped wire

all coiled against the quarry man’s

hands. You dance the polecat dance,

I lay by the tires, unseen. I crawled

here, sniffing the ground for clues,

bloodhound, girl child rooting you out.

Get gone, you’d say. No way ma mère.

I love you like Elvis loved pistols,

stroking you in the television light,

the possibility of that music

better than all the stages in the world.

Girl, you keep rocking just like so

I’ll go down river and catch you a fish

with my dirty hands, no man

can contain the love I have for you

nor the rapt attention. Take my hand,

take my whole life too. I’ve slicked

my hair back, I’ve made myself

a boy for you.

A must read for language buffs, Joshua Foer's "Utopian for Beginners" in The New Yorker: Foer talks about artificial languages invented by Hildegard von Bingen (Lingua Ignota) through John Wilkins (a new universal language) to John Quijada (Ithkuil):

All families are happy in the same way, while being unhappy in their own way [Tolstoy, Anna Karenina]

the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees. . . .

Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

Who knew that George Soros's first language was Esperanto?