sailed a private plane;
against the apricot nightdress meridian
went a shift in the rustle of pollens.
is there anything more hidden that what's always been there.
so deeply obvious it goes easily unnoticed.
who calls our attention to this restores us like the sea air,
like an old postmark, like the generous applause of an audience on its feet.
{photo from laura letinsky, from her 'i did not remember that i had forgotten' series. thanks to jen at 'simply photo'.}
i do not know these two boys. but as i watched them on the shore, there was a moment when they held still, and watched as the water crept up to and over their feet.
i clicked the shutter and held the moment still. it was exactly the right moment. the moment was ripe, and i took it. here it is.
this photograph was rather ho hum until i converted it into a digitalized lithograph. we can no longer see the sun in the photograph, though it has everything to do with everything, how half the water is white and the other half black; how the birds on the black water are white and the birds on the white water are black.
these two are solarized; no longer mere leaves and shadows on the porch, but leaves like cut stones and the rhythm of the wood grain; no longer a clichéd scene on a lake, but the importance of feathers and surfaces and beaks.
before altering this one, the chain and post were not noticeable. now they are the most delicious part:
i found this german DIY website through fototiller. how simple and lovely, a hothouse out of jewel cases. there are also other projects that are more tongue in cheek, such as this one:
i know people like to shop the day after thanksgiving, but i've always been very turned off by that idea. i'm not the kind of person to be among the first to do anything. i much prefer waiting until everyone has moved on to the next thing, so that i can enjoy their last thing in peace.
so here i am at home, enjoying a deliciously lazy day, eating a turkey pot pie, making little connections, and so on.
some good food for thought i've come across today:
photography by do you see what i see, courtesy of daily dose of imagery, an amazing site of its own, which i found through aref-adib from the UK. it just won a prestigious blog award for a reason.
oh the lovely lovely link.
the excitement and happiness of hyperlinks.
go here to be completely bowled over by darren price. he's brilliant and so is this beautiful and bittersweet film.
heaps of banana thank yous to sidney for sending me this in the mail.
something else nice i found at language hat: this webster's dictionary project, edited by josh wallaert, is in the form of a blog, which makes the entries read even more like the poetry that they are.
one more goodie: poet paul guest's blog almost i rushed from home to tell you this (what a wonderful name for a blog) was a nice find on my leisurely stroll through blogland last night. one of his posts from a few days ago was accompanied my this picture:
and reads:
"This is really speaking to me this morning. I haven't got the hair but I think I can find some weapons. A sack of lit mags, maybe. Or flaming rejection slips. Years of self recrimination.
Oh, yes, I'm ready."
and there is one more thing, actually. so much i want to share today. 
go to chicago photographer brian ulrich's site not if but when. look at everything, but i am particularly drawn to the thriftstore series. i found him through this photo, which was posted on the pixos themed photo site.
so much that is good. this is why i would rather not read the news. it gives one the opposite feeling that the world is coming to an end.
my bitewing's on the lightboard
while you peruse it
notch by notch
then fix your eye on me severely
with your monocle
it takes nerve to come here
and be admonished for not
flossing enough
i'd like to explain it isn't laziness
but something else
that i am the kind to do homework
that isn't required
to talk to plants to help
them grow, but any excuses
would come out garbled
and indecipherable
with your hand wedged in my mouth
peeking under the petticoats
of all my teeth,
probing the guilty bicuspid
until it triggers an ache,
poking harder than would be necessary
and you know it.
should we ever have a falling out
i will bring this up.
for lovers of aggregates like me, this collective noun site is a worthwhile excursion.
as far as my favorites go, they are:
an addition of mathematicians
a fascination of onlookers
a fidget of suspects
a hiss of lisps
an immersion of baptists
an ostentation of peacocks
a pack of suitcases
a scandal of shoes
a squint of proofreaders
a tilt of windmills
thanks to verbatim for the link.
another treasure trove i found through this site is librarian marylaine block's review of interesting things on the web. here i found harper's magazine's site, featuring all manner of quirky and stranger than fiction facts that harper's has collected over the years. my favorite category thus far is folly, where there are tales to be told such as:
A Georgia woman was arrested for trying to pass a fake $1 million bill at a Wal-Mart.
and
A Liverpool, England, man was sentenced to 100 hours of community service for getting drunk and singing "YMCA" on a flight from Florida to Manchester while his wife wept and comforted their three children. "He makes no excuses," said the man's lawyer, "for his loutish, idiotic behavior."
i'm so delighted, i can hardly tear myself away from the computer.
sean jones doesn't just animate snails; he makes them dignified. he gives them flawless french, though he translates what they say into english, for the rest of us.
since the text is too small to read unless you click on it, i will copy it out:
"a contemplation in the gutter. the residue of belief.
a party of parisian smoking snails (a variety only found in paris) met in a gutter to discuss descartes. a slick sticky truth evaded for sake of propriety.
"follow the simple to the complex in a spiral. follow the spiral of smoke until it is nothing," jean-remi says with his voice trailing away.
they all laugh. the wistful smoke floats.
jean-louis clears his raspy throat and says, "i leave a trail of slime therefore i am."
they all laugh.
"i doubt and i doubt my doubts until my foundations are particles floating to heaven," jean-adrien says.
they close their eyes as they suck at their discarded cigarette butts.
jean-jacques blinks and looks at the smoke above, "if every truth is a cloud floating away...if every love dissipates into heaven or tangles in my chest..."
"you talk like a romantic!" jean-marcel bellows.
they all laugh. their shells bounce a little as they laugh.
jean-basile mumbles through his smoke curtain:
"there is a substance, an element if you will, call it conflue, it is the residue of a thought, of an unknown belief, that sticks to our past and leaves an ambiguous trail of self and confusion."
the others shake their heads and stare at the gutter grit.
paris gutters are lined with trails of thought from wondering snails that never find a home.
never deduce it is on their back."
!!!
go here and see more of his brilliance and charm.
su blackwell's glorious bookcuts gave me an idea for a poem:
what mad hats books make
sheer and precipitous
when steeped in tea.
when sweet tempered turnstiles
pour us out of the subway
our admirers will double
our admirers will be only too delighted
our hats will be so mad.
so lie flat, mouse dear
and have some wine
we will read more about now later
when its newness has worn off
and we can shape it the more to our liking.
thanks to bb's blog for the wonderful link.
o and i almost forgot the wonderful and sweetly morbid work of benji whalen, to add to the treasure package.
thanks to bright stupid confetti, whose fan i am.
i have been hollowing around inside a black apple, and i just want to say that emily makes me want to paint forests on the living room wall, and wear more red lipstick. i'm very smitten by her optimism, and by the whole quality of the world she makes around herself.
she also shares wonderful things like this cassette generator, where i made this imaginary music:
for more treasure, visit here, and click on the blackbird.
and thanks to poppy, who introduced me to pdn gallery, and especially to erica shires:
smooch.
clothesline: underrated thing for which sunlight only is the trick
greylag: the goose that flies behind the others
tooth: a transmitter of flavor and pain
funk: the sad goo at the bottom of a frame of mind
vestigial: the smallest bone in memory's body
malaprop: "tonight i'm going to drink myself to bolivia."
bedridden: bottom living fishes are either flat or else they lie permanently on one side
time: a city of immense clocks and rusted flutes
l'essence: "it's the idea of gas that people are paying for."
'time to spare' makes it sound like we don't really need it,
a margin left over and superfluous
from which we need to be saved,
relieved of the terrible responsibility
of finding something extra to do with ourselves.
why is space and not time protected?
is not time, let alone spare time, endangered also?
why don't time-saving devices buy as much spare time
as one would think?
i wish i had the spare time of these smooth flat stones; now in the sun, now in the shade, now in the rain, and now and again in the picture.
a is for the ampersand 
i found in the
..the sand,
z is for zoom,
which is what i do here:
i is for isabel,
with the wind in her ear,
f is for the finery of the ocean's handwriting,
y is for yogurt with the cream at the top,
v is for the vacation 
i had this time last month,
j is the jubilarian i aspire to be,
and q 
is for my quadruped:
though i mentioned her already.
to the quiet hammocks buried under leaves.
in my scantily clad tree i keep watch over an aerial memory
that pulls on the others it's stitched to.
leaf cleaving to leaf.
in the shadowy underfoot.
november,
so spiked with punch.
now the beets are boiling, cheekbone bright.
i wish we were required
to idle and bask
at least one hour a day,
i wish i could distill one ounce of perfume
out of everything before it escapes me.
this illustration is from a 1942 edition of "the human body," by logan clendening, m.d. it is titled "the birth of the stethoscope."
i also found this poem i wanted to share by corinn adams, from the latest diagram. i just love the last line so much:
REYKJAVIK OR PRAGUE
It's a dark beer from Brazil.
It's palm-size with a silver finish.
It's fishnet but a tasteful fishnet.
It's number one in Reykjavik or Prague.
It's called "sonnet" but it’s video projection.
It's called "ballet" but it’s video projection.
It's titled something with a backslash.
It's a baby carriage full of press-on nails.
It's Colette of the LES.
It's Rimbaud on Avenue A.
It's Baudelaire on NPR
but it's a little Jean Genet.
It's mainstream before it's time.
It's clever but it's clever in air quotes.
It's knee-high to avant-garde.
It's hearing me use "earnest" as a slur.
It's the way I name a certain inky sky.
It's that blue of every cell phone two years back.
It's you saying, now I know the sky you mean.
It's the kind of coat they only sell in the Midwest.
It's just a field we stood in with our coats on.
It's snow on the porch roof.
It's the first time anyone has spoken in an hour.
Look at it out there, goodness gracious.
jean-michel's post about TLDR and RTFM had me looking into the world of initialisms for the first time. initialisms, according to wikipedia, differ from acronyms in that they are not pronounced as a word but by each of their letters separately. initialisms and acronyms are handy for those who don't have time to spell things out; this is why they seem to abound mostly in the military and business worlds. what i find curious is that this abbreviated form of human communication is also prevalent in casual internet interaction. for instance, the initialism TLDR is a common internet response to a post that is long and boring: it stands for "too long, didn't read." my hunch is that a person who doesn't have the patience to spell out those four little words isn't likely to have an attention span for much of any reading material.
don't get me wrong; i am all about brevity, just not at the cost of meaning. there is nothing tangible about an initialism; no--as it is said in french--'liason.' at least an acronym forms a word, and a word is automatically imbued with associations. as acronyms age, they can harden into diamonds undifferentiated from other beloved pieces of our vocabulary: sonar, radar, scuba. these are words you can use in a poem. and you can use "rolling on the floor laughing" in a poem but you cannot use ROTFL.
i'm sorry you just cannot.
yes, i did get the idea from that genius tom phillips. this website is fantastic. you can see everypage of 'a humument' in all its glory.
the poem below was in my yahoo mailbox this morning. it is written by helen cho, one of those dear friends you can manage to have nowadays without ever meeting them. i was especially taken by her friendster profile about... was it about two years ago...?! i seemed we had much in common, all the way down to our common delight in keeping chickens. at the time i worked at a restaurant very near to her home in the east bay, and i think we even might have arranged a tentative plan to meet on a monday. the memory is foggy now, but the plan fell through somehow. but she put me on her mailing list of lucky people who receive regular little gifts from her via email--telescopic links into the sea of various brilliant artists, tantalizing poems, recipes you want to make right away, hundreds of smart observations about the world, all that have enriched my life to a tremendous degree.
this latest poem is my newest favorite:
Your House
It is an unobstructed view I have
of burnt hills, a bridge touching a city, eucalyptus,
a steel tower, the open moon.
I would give these things away,
like a rich man
sweeping bare his porch
of leaves that have fallen in the night.
I shrug out of my human form,
to cross
rivers as deep as myself, wriggle
down the ravine,
bruised, sliding, holding roots.
It's a blind mile, each tree girth
rubbed smooth of moss, blackened
my hand's cold slide
and finger mark.
Soaked, I run past
the bee hives and mottled hay to knock on the windows,
hail and fist.
I spread out my fingers against the glass,
torn wide, to prove
it is still a hand.
The barbs of a wing feather interlock.
I hear your voice and run
to the back of the house. You feed the geese
white oats
snowed in mud
and see through
my destinations,
even my greed for you.
You have come back.
I say nothing but remain
in place.
I belong here like the geese
and bees, every stone in the house
and field, every finger on your hand,
the dress you wear upon your skin,
and the other you keep new
for better days.
"and it's easy to fix in all kinds of ways-- some we'll wager that have never entered your mind."
--general foods kitchens
