Elena Fanailova

I finished the eggplant mouse’s body, unraveled it 
am midway through a green mouse’s body with a smaller needle 

my blog statistics indicate that 
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I should read more Russian poetry:

Elena Fanailova [pic by Stanislav Lvovsky courtesy of Jacket2]

Lena and Lena

by Elena Fanailova

1

Lena is going to Belgrade

To see her lover,

The one she met in Sarajevo

Right in the airport.

They walk around in Kalemegdan

Look at a photo exhibit

Eat in a fish restaurant

On the banks of the Danube

They don’t get as far as Zemun

And end up a little irritated, waiting:

The taxi doesn’t come right away . . .

He’s very diplomatic
And very tender
That shape of personality and behavior
That she longed for in the dark

But his face wrenches out of shape
When he hears people speaking Hebrew
And hears their self-confident laughter
At the next table
Also he has pretty terrible taste . . .

Fucking, pure fucking until you see stars
As an instrument of cognition

read the rest of Fanailova's poem here

Emily Dickinson [pic courtesy of Wikipedia]

A tour de force read of the word thumb from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

An original Disobedience: A girl in bed alone sucking her thumb.Thumb: short thick first or most preaxial digit of the human hand differing from the four fingers in having greater freedom of movement and being opposable to the other fingers. Thumb and Gnome have silent letters and rhyme wrongly with Gun and whom. For Freudians, thumb and gun are phallic and the same. Without a thumb, it would be hard to grip a gun. The thumb helps my fingers grip, helps to turn the pages of a book. All thumbs — Awkward. Under the thumb: under control of. Thumb: To feel point press attack . . . to play. To thumb one’s nose at the collective wisdom of the ages. Wives and slaves were thumbs. In the nineteenth century a mark made with the inked thumb was used for identification of an illiterate person. Thumb rhymes with dumb.Thumb a nursery word rhymes crookedly with ‘time’ riddled back to Jack Horner who sat in his corner, eating a Christmas Pie. He put in his thumb pulled out a plum and said “What a good boy am I!” Good Uncle Tom. Was Jack put in the corner because he was wrong or dumb? What had he done? Back around to foe and Master and Jack the Giant Killer climbing his beanstalk to hear the “Fie, foh, and fum,” of Edgar/Tom’s mad song, “I smell the blood of a British man./ Be he alive or be he dead,/ I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” Jack, and Jacob the Bible’s poet, were both ladder-watchers. Tom Thumb (“Your Gnome”) was little but as powerful as David the other biblical poet, who slew Goliath with a sling-shot. Cover the touch-hole of a cannon with your thumb. She, GUN-THUMB-YELLOW EYE-BULLET-POET-GNOME is emphatic. Dauntless predator and protector.

coot eggs in large, reed-mounted nest

This afternoon Collin, Molly, Sarah, Beth, & I took a bird walk around the community lake. We identified chestnut-capped blackbird, red-gartered coot, pied-billed grebe, whistling heron, bare-faced ibis, jacana, South American stilt, & Coscoroba swan. We also saw algae, reeds, nests with & without eggs, fish ranging from tiny minnows to oversized koi, & small curled snails.

Phimosus infuscatus, Bare-faced ibis

Fulica armillata, Red-gartered Coot feeding cootlets

Coscoroba coscoroba, Coscoroba Swan