You could do this while hiking in a difficult terrain

The author of Kilimanjaro: A photographic journey to the Roof of Africa composed a song in the language he learnt in the four days he was in the mountains hiking.

Joys of poetic acquaintances

I came across Those Winter Sundays in The 100 best African American Poems and recognised having read it before. There was a sudden surge of interest in eating and staying awake.
I try to get my hands on whatever poetry lies on the racks in the town library. I leaf through words and most times miss their connection in the poem, looking for that poem which spikes my interest in its wholeness, some relay themselves much later.

Desires

because desires do not split themselves up, there is
one desire
touching the many things, and it is continuous

Human Wishes, Robert Hass

Is it the school of reason that goads you with a stick to just find one reason for an action that leads us into the single desire conclusion?

Desire is among other things a function of repitition or so the very patterns of life have led you to believe.
Annotations, John Keene

Pursuit of Art

Art of Islam

Maghrib
Opus sectile
Faience
Astragal
Mushrabbiya

Title reminded me of maths

Open Interval
Reclining nude by
Romare Bearden
More
Bafoussam

How the big banged

Leavings
Let us hear from you
Antaeus

Stegner Fellows:
Ernie J Gaines
Ed McClanahan

Hayden Carruth disliked Alice in Wonderland.

Edgar Sawtelle

Bulgogi
Hangul letters

A public space

Summer 2006
To Aphrodite W.S. DI PIERO
Kewpie doll

Hereafter

Rain makes parting easy
When someone calls your name, you bring all of you into life.

The Innocence of time

from The National library of Poetry

Aventurine

Geoffrey Wolff

A Day at the Beach
Rejans
shoehorn
Sikorsky is not a place.
Delahaye

Chemistry to aid

Mothers

Another Marvelous thing - Laurie Colwin
It starts with a soon-to-be mother in high blood pressure.
What a rollercoaster birthing can be!
Hydralazine
Pitocin
Magnesium sulphate
Betadine

This will trouble me till I spit it out

Watching the promos of the coming soon movies I liked the sentence .. people bound by a single ribbon of asphalt.. regarding a crowd at an autorace track.

Rear window art

US Army sign
Two horses holding onto a downturned horseshoe

Michael Jordans
Flight into air - window length

A hippie jeep with stuff crudded on it like warts on the flying dutchman

Money Laundry

Its time to shift
the clothes from
washer to dryer

On opening the round
door
there is a stack of folded
dollars on the rim
rejected by the laundry machine
as are some soap bubbles

I take the money vended
dont even try recalling
where it was leftover from
With still some clothes in
I find yet another dollar

If kids knew

that body language speaks
they wouldnt scream
that their face voices
they wouldnt contort their vocals

Even in a veil
the eyes can tell

Still in dreams
they would have to shout
find their voices

**************************************
..little gestures often reveal our true selves..
- Crafting the personal essay, Dinty W Moore

Stone grinder

Two thick circular
slabs of stone
one on another
the top one with
a hole like a pot

In go the grains
jowar,wheat
lentils - bengal gram
with enough muscle power
move the vertical wooden handle
round and round
see the flour fall onto the sheet
in a cascade.

Healing stories for a hospital

Kathleen Hirsch in 'Mothers'.."As I sat in clinic offices staring at photographs of alpine meadows and gorgeous mountain vistas intended to help me think positive thoughts.."
I suggest pictures of a prism splitting white light into the constituent colors or of a rainbow or a window.
Corinna Vallianatos in 'A civilizing effect' that appeared in A public space:
the hospital had its own collection of art, which consisted of bronze frogs on bronze lily pads and black and white photographs of splints and stethoscopes.

The right tree

At phoenix Audubon, there is a tree in the backside with just enough leaves so as to not crowd the space, sky.

Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries
Nicotiana
Dianthus
Caragana is used as food by larvae of Dark Dagger. 'the Bumper book of nature' has a list of plants and the pupae that grow on them.
flour-barrel babies
Cyclamen
Mercerised

It starts with the blurb

The Memorykeeper's daughter
Long time ago when I saw this book at Borders, I wondered what it was all about.

Apgar
Do I see some insurance gaps right in the beginning?
A little into the hospital rumour gives a clue as to why Caroline might raise the child.

Hope springs?

Instructions for visitors
Perpignan railway station
Cafe de la Gare
Feria
Mairie
Canigou
cathar castles
Buddleia

Barbara Kingsolver

Animal Dreams
Semilla besada

Healing

Kitchen table wisdom
primary intention
Immune system imagery
Spores
Johnny Appleseed
Shiva
Prayer wheel
Holmes-Rahe Stress Index
Ileostomy
Pelargonium
Enterostomal

Shells

The Gift of Sea
Whelk
Channeled Whelk
Moon shell
Double sunrise shell
book on npr
Cats cradle yarn game

Kenneth Kamler

Surviving the extremes
Cofan Indians
caiman alligator

lidocaine
Epineurium
Termitophiles - tiny insects hat live within termite colonies.
Febris
Heliconia
Achiote
snake venom variety - nerve poison, poison blood

Lake culture

Kettle Lakes
Limnology

Another Everest tale

Kingdoms of Experience
Muztagh tower
trango towers
Tom Patey
Nuptse
Lancastrian
Fell running
Slocht
Clachaig
Willi Unsoeld
Squaddies - soldiers slang.

Milosz prose

The captive Mind
Husserl
Witkiewicz

Some cool things to do in nature

From The Bumper Book of Nature
Make a bark rubbing on a paper
sit/stand still for an hour and notice sounds
Record tree sounds in hollows
Blind walk in the woods
While keeping bird records in your nature diary - Date, Location, Time of sighting/time spent in the field, who you were with, weather conditions, names of species, any interesting or unusual behavior, memorable moments.

I was looking at Yellowstone trip pictures and found 2 rainbows in it and noticed that in the other the colors were reversed and 'count the colors of a rainbow' section confirms this.

Telling direction with a watch.

Poetry Feb 2010

Duns Grunbein
Modern day Rilke

Iceberg view of a young Weddell seal

Oceans
What a point it would be to stand away from earth and take alook at it, like the oceanographer and the child.
Blanket Octopus.
Marine Iguanas. A closeup shot. The patterns on its mouth like stiches in a row, cubes and then hexagons as you move up. The eye is like a far view of the cosmos. A picture of one going up with its forelimbs against the body and hind limbs like an outstretched frog's, like a ninja. It looks in peace.

Lion man

Part of the Pride
Paddatjie, my colleague tells me is pronounced as padykie and is a little frog. Padda is a frog. I overheard that Afrikaans is a language just a few months ago at a birthday party. He says that it is very similar to Dutch.
Kudu
Eternal enemies documentary. Lions and hyenas, one preying the young of the other.
White eye

Likeable Experimenter

Carrying the heart
Lazzaro Spallanzani

Why are unicorns always under attack?

The Natural History of Unicorns

Ctesias
Chiru
Kiang
Verteuil Tapestries
Khutu
Takin
Unbelievable SDZoo
okapi
Rishyasringa
While most animals have horns on their heads, tusks grow downwards. If man had some strong weapon like those sharp things, how different would our evolutionary path have been?

When things breakdown

Medical Mysteries
Tree Man from Indonesia makes us appreciate our functional immune system.
TMAU

Fair Day

Can a person who judges have mercy?

In a crystal ball

I should have written this long time ago, when it happened.
Have you ever felt like you are in a crystal ball?
A month ago, I went stargazing with friends. Four peaks ecen though very close to the freeway was far enough from th Phoenix city lights that only one side of the view had a hint of civilization. If you turn your back on the city, above and around you is a multitude of stars. There is the Milky Way. As shooting stars went, they became as common as dragonflies near a water source. We waited for the Orion to appear, not in the magical - whole of it at once, but in his imperfect, incomplete form with parts of his body showing up with patience on our part like a baby making its way from beneath the mountains. During my undergrad, I used the university telescope and the night I saw the ring around Saturn, I went home like Alice who is just back from her rabbit hole excursion. That was a time when I thought reading Antony and Cleopatra (keeping my engineering books aside during a college festival) would immerse me in their world and I will still be safe, back in time when my professors and the student world is ready to go over the lessons. The easiest to remember was Cassioepia. Easiest to spot too. When I looked at Pleides, the detail even through my binoculars got it alive for me. When I was showm Andromeda, the concept of light years picked from Carl Sagan's novel Contact still seems like a fairy tale. When I was told that it will take over a year to follow some points and see a good chunk of it, I started relating it to birdwatching. Seasons. I once had a very beautiful dream where I saw all the zodiac signs and clearly in their meant shapes.
I recall 'Two on a Tower' by Thomas Hardy, imagining as the person who looks to the sky.

Persona

Is persona free from fate?

Poem

When I read A Blessing, a poem by James Wright in poems about horses, I leapt at the last sentence. I recognise this reaction. The same one when I read it last time.

Recently Billy Collins against expectation did not consider rap as poetry. A friend considers unrhyming poetry as rap.

I like poems. I like songs. I like music. I like lyric.

One is not other.

What is Poetry? A posy that you want to add to your basket. A gadget that you know of it from its effect but not what it is. A Swiss army knife.

Throw back

Yesterday afternoon
I went on a walk
AC inside was too cool
Next to the bushes
breathing in
I was reminded of
white milk icecream
that we had on sticks
sold in blue cart on wheels
by a hawker
Was it the squeezing of self
to take in the melted juices?

Back inside I had momentary
cold and sneeze from the
pollen/milk icecream.

Proximate nature

Crow planet
If you tell me that you havent seen a young crow, I will believe you. But the author wont. She says " .. it is unlikely to be true... The problem is that we equate youngness with smallness, a mistake when it comes to most birds". Its through such breaking of our uninformed notions about crows, that the author makes us aware of the ubiquitous bird, its nesting behavior, its smartness.
Quoting Louis Pasteur that 'chance favors the prepared mind' she urges us to know more about our home ecosystems, get out walking and do the bird watching right outside our house instead of bringing our scopes out after driving hours to the other place called wilderness.
Bat box
Dec 22,2009

Aftermath

What happens to the passion
of artists like Jackson Pollock
when they die?

Next stop Getty center

By 1830s Victor Hugo was all Nostradamus about architecture being replaced by the products of printing press. But in 1420's, Cyriacus believed that ancient monuments were more crucial than texts. On travels as an accountant, Cyriacus was very fascinated by the ancient monuments in Venice, Alexandria, Constantinople. He set about travelling around and documenting all the sites of the ancient world. He turned the focus of the people from texts to the physical monuments.
To wake the dead

Dec 27,2009

When are you done appreciating art

When you cam move onto the next
when you are hungry or angry
when you are tailgated

Sociology

Global Sociology, Introducing Five Contemporary societies begins with Japan. Sadly, my book has only two societies, Japan and Egypt.
Reading about Japanese children blocks being big and involving teamwork, I want to knwo mroe about other societies.
Reading of deviant behavior, I want to know more about what holds the 'culture' in place. If there is a mechanism for preservation or flexibility is a part of it. Japan, small still has half of US population. In the beginning the author talk of its culture being open to influences, yet to know how it assimilates the deviances.

Morning tidings

Mocking bird just woke up at 5.50

An hour later, clouds rolled out like fish scales end with a thick edge.

Sky Harbor's heavy purse

As I got off the elevator at baggage claim, I couldnt help noticing the sparkles on the floor and the newness of a building about to be occupied while there were parts of the walls high above still wrapped in white plastic. Paul Goldberger, in Situation Terminal calling airports a logistical nightmare reasons that the last thing the cash-starved airlines and airport authorities want to think about is aesthetic appeal.

Wake up

The morning sunlight
turns eucalyptus
and every other tree
around into
a flowering acacia

A far neighbor has
a rooster

Starvation

I want to understand what does it mean to have people dying of starvation. 'Aid' if it does not work without production. Reading of The Great Starvation Experiment, I see why someone has to volunteer for this exam. A person in malnutrition state might seem like an ideal candidate for the study. But for moral reason, a starving person will have to be restored to health.