Shoveling by Moonlight

At sunset, my neighbors' holiday lights cast an eerie glow from beneath the new snow. Like four miniature suns, they formed part of an alien wintry landscape. After my walk, I finished shoveling by moonlight.

La Fovea

I was invited by wonderful poet Pamela Hart to join in the fun on La Fovea, an online literary magazine with an intriguing concept. Editor Frank Giampietro just posted two of my prose poems, "Tortoiseshell" and "Bride Number Two." If you want to read them, simply click on this link:

La Fovea

Then make sure to travel on and explore this expanding community of poets!

I was fascinated by the unusual way this publication works. Here is a description from the Web site explaining "the rules":

•Each nerve editor (found on the main page) is in charge of a nerve. The nerves are made up of poets who are invited to submit to La Fovea. Click on the editor's name to see all the poets and poems in his or her nerve.

•The nerve editor asks a poet to submit two poems. After that poet has had his or her poems published on La Fovea, he or she will ask another poet to submit poems.

•If the last poet on the nerve does not find a poet to submit poems for whatever reason, the nerve is called "dead." It's okay to have a "dead nerve." The important thing is for the nerve editor to notice that a nerve has died and begin a new nerve from their first page of poems.

I also enjoyed the inspirational quote from a letter Frank O'Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch, which explains the title, La Fovea. Here are O'Hara's words:

"Kenneth you really are the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system / which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance / of distraught experiences and hysterical desires so to keep things humming / and have nothing go off the trackless tracks"

--Frank O'Hara

And now, a brief biology lesson about the eye from La Fovea's editor, Frank Giampietro:

The fovea is the place on the back of the eye where the nerves gather and take signals from the eye to the brain. Ironically, the fovea is the only place on the back of the eye that does not imprint an image. Instead the brain fills in the image based on information around it so that we don't have a small spot in our vision.

We think the term is, well, poetic and sums up in a metaphor a lot of what it means to find, and "to see," excellent poems.

The poets whose work appears on this website agree in part or in whole with the following manifesto:

1. We believe that it makes no sense to say one form of poetry is more valid or more artistic than any other.

2. We believe that the old model of submission/rejection is but only one way for finding and publishing the best poetry.

3. We want poets rather than poet/editors to have more editorial authority in general. Poets should be able to champion people they love and have their opinions "matter."

4. We think La Fovea will encourage poets to read each other's poems because they will want to know who else is on their nerve. They will want to ask, "With whom am I related?"

Thanks to Pam for inviting me to join her nerve on La Fovea, and thanks to Frank for posting the prose poems. Stay tuned to find out who I invited to join the nerve.

Oh ... the wildly gorgeous eyes above belong to a very laid-back ragdoll cat, Poodiddy, who belongs -- sort of -- to my younger brother and sister-in-law. He didn't even seem to mind my camera right up next to his whiskers. Click on the image to enlarge.

Tree with the Moon in the Palm of Its Hand

Yes, I'll say that again: tree with the moon in the palm of its hand.

This photo was taken at the very end of November. Standing there, looking up, I felt like that pearl of a moon was being offered to me. I guess it was. I took it. Now I'll pass it on to you.

For a closer look, simply click on the image.

Ice Thorn

Late this afternoon, at the top of my hill: an ice thorn encasing the last of the light.

The Face of the World

Yesterday, this milkweed plant captured the austere beauty of late November. I love the shape of the pods as they dry and twist, having released most of their silk-haired seeds. The forms grow simpler, the colors muted. The eye exalts in the stark new patterns that reveal themselves at the end of fall.

Ralph Waldo Emerson comments on this in Nature:

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, -- that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, -- the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty, "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Liberman's Castle

"Castle," a painted steel sculpture by Alexander Liberman, graces the grounds of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation as part of Art in the Parks. I love the Picasso-esque composition this section creates with its bold orange curves, crisp shadows, and black cables in beautiful contrast to the sky. It's huge: 42' x 30' x 40'. Part of the fun was watching its construction by crane. One afternoon, while I sat on a bench in the sun, I looked on with delight as a small boy leaped from a van and raced toward the sculpture, arms raised, awestruck.

Milkweed Bugs

In "The Ninth Elegy" from The Essential Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these powerful lines:

Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and avow it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
shunted aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new
containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann

I praise these milkweed bugs (yes, that's really what they're called), observed in all their orange-red glory at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York. The photo was taken on 10/11/09. To see the milkweed bugs more clearly, simply click on the image.

The above excerpt was found on p. 133 of The Essential Rilke, translated in 1999 by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, The Ecco Press. Rilke lived from 1875-1926.