Praying Mantis in the Fleabane!

In August I planted a dwarf butterfly bush, a sterile cultivar called Pugster Blue Fragrant. While not a native plant, it cannot be invasive like its larger relatives. I got it locally at Halas Nursery and even there it was swarmed with pollinators: butterflies, moths and bees. It was pungent and had filled my car with its heavy sweetish smell on the ride home.

After all the digging and watering, I went in the house for some coffee. I looked back out the window and there was a black swallowtale on my new butterfly bush already!  For the next few days, there were always one or two butterflies enjoying the flowers.  But after a week I didn't see any. I figured they were enjoying a change of diet over in my neighbors cone flowers. I kept peeking about but no butterflies.

All summer I have been nurturing a few stands of wildflower weeds as a garden project. The weeds in question are four-foot tall forests of Daisy Fleabane and Queen Anne's Lace. While I was looking for the missing butterflies, I found three praying mantis

- mostly hanging from the stems of Fleabane by their back legs - looking a lot like dead leaves. They have a reputation as voracious indiscriminate predators, even cannibalistic. Mantises eat a lot of annoying insects. But I think they may have eaten the butterflies as well.

Nature is capricious and pragmatic. Next year I think I will let the Fleabane grow elsewhere in my yard - somewhere not in a direct line between the butterfly bush and the cone flowers down the road....

April 2016 Poem A Day #30

The prompt was write a dead end poem. I hate that.

No absolutely not

No endings, dead or otherwise
are permitted in this poem
this is a living cascade
it will not stop this day
or any day to come
this life will
go on with or without me
with or without another poem
the little one celled things
will stretch and divide
and the little wavy armed things
will reach out and grab a meal
somewhere in the miniature
a future of spinning orbs
until a black hole grabs
it all, and then who knows
what happens in there?

ReplyDelete

April 2016 Poem A Day #25 - Planting

Planting
the spring exercise

  Position the shovel.
  Place your full weight
  on the shovel by standing
  on its top rim so the shovel
  sinks into the earth.
  Rock the shovel back and
  forth to loosen the earth.
  Leverage it down
  and swing up
  this small load of earth
  out of a brand new hole.
  Empty the shovel to the side
  Do over. Do over. Do over. Do over.
  Remove the container and wrappings
  from the plant and set it in the hole.
  With a trowel ease the dirt around the plant.
  Gently tamp with a thumb or a toe.
  Keep filling in with rich loose earth.
  Water liberally.

April 2016 Poem A Day #19 Heaven and Hell explained

Heaven and Hell explained

Considering the sea, it may be, life and time
must brew themselves in boiling brine
near some star 'splosion or volcanic vent
Melt the immobile start the drip
set off the ticking universe
for a hot, rotational trip.
But for timeless or eternal
an absolute zero temperature is best.
As any motion
would be a timeline,
cancel out eternal rest.

Dia Beacon then Hudson River gawking

This is a view of one of the giant sculptures on view at Dia in the lower level. A friend invted me on this excursion, and rather than wait around all day for primary results I thought, why not a day trip.  You can walk inside these metal pieces and if you sing a little the echo is stunning.  Later we stumbled into the parking lot of the Beacon train station which is right on the Hudson River. On this balmy Feb. day I needed no coat, hat or gloves - but ice was still in the river from last weeks -9 temps. Weird. We later had an early dinner at Max's on Main in Beacon. Great day.

Weir Farm Pond Loop - a gorgeous fall walk

Went for a bit of a short walk with a friend at Weir Farm National Park - the Weir Farm pond loop. The day was bright and crisp, and the scenery was rustic and lovely. To view these and the rest of the album: https://plus.google.com/photos/100545602569648912341/albums/6080980231467734241

Seeing beauty in the universe

This is a video I particularly liked from YouTube, though as a naturalist I might quibble with the term spirituality. I take that to mean that feeling of being in the moment, a part of,  feeling in unison with what is around you. If you click through and watch this on YouTube itself, you can read the text the videographer has put up alongside it.

Pigeon holes and Platitudes

People love platitudes. I'm fond of a few myself. Just check the memes floating around Facebook and other social networks. Platitudes and pigeonholes make us relax. Reality, not so much.

In general people prefer that disturbing realities fold their wings neatly, then duck politely into a sturdy square box with a lid, out of sight - a box that keeps its contents in check - so things can't pop out and flop around in plain sight. Otherwise people might start questioning their faith in a happy world where a good-guy god reigns and where everyone who needs soon has.

We reach for platitudes for comfort.. Nonsense like: "Everything happens for a reason. Everything works out for the best."  Tell that to an antelope being torn apart by hyenas. The messy truth is this: the living world runs on death. Hamburgers, salmon steak and chicken wings have all been ripped untimely from beasts who weren't through with them yet. Don't let the grocery store's neat Styrofoam trays and pristine shrink wrap fool you. Life eats other life in order to continue. Purportedly this is the invention of a gentle loving god.

People too end in unseemly ways. They get blown up, burnt to cinders, have limbs severed, are mangled inside car wrecks,  beaten to death, starve in slow bony collapse, ache with suicidal despair, have their bleeding guts poured out on indifferent ground before laughing witnesses.

It's just easier for the more comfortable branches of the human race not to think about it much. We stuff this information into a little square pigeonhole and we paste a few decorator platitudes on top of it.

This enables us to buy expensive designer sneakers and iPhones for our kids without guilt. It enables us to live as extravagantly as possible believing we deserve it all, or to happily enjoy whatever small pleasures we can find while rationalizing away the world's ubiquitous cruelty and inequity.

This philosophical slight of hand makes it possible to have lunch once in a while. And after all, if you have lunch - you might as well savor every bite....

Bon appetite.

-- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker
originally written April 9, 2002 & updated in 2013. 

the Phoebe Wars

Skill and sweat built the house where I grew up -- the skill and sweat of my father (left), his father, and my mother (below), guided by blueprints scratched on the back of an old window shade.

Almost before the roof was on, another kind of building was in progress. Two little grey birds with instinctive skill and determination of their own were slinging mud and moss under the back porch overhang. They cemented their nest to the side of ours - a union that would last more than forty years.



.
By a bird's reckoning it was a perfect location. It was a foil for cats, eight feet off the ground with no climbable surfaces below. It was totally sheltered from the weather by the porch floor above and protected on three sides by the cellar-door alcove. With nearby woods the supply of insects was endless and mud for the nest was readily available. In short it was phoebe paradise.

Every year since then, a pair of phoebes has happily dribbled mud somewhere on this house. Evidently phoebes are like salmon and earnest men - willing to swim against the current to reach their stream of origin. The opposing current in this case was my father who was determined to move them. Their preferred nesting spot was directly above the cellar door, which Dad used several times a day. He hated to disturb them once there were eggs involved and he worried the nest would fall if he inadvertently slammed the door. His only alternative was using the garage door. The roar of it always sent the phoebe flapping off to a nearby tree, leaving her four or five whitish eggs cooling alone.

My father spent a lot of time thinking about how to outwit those birds. He didn't want to hurt them. He was in fact a bird enthusiast who provided suet in net-bags and bird feeders overflowing with sunflower and other seed. These treats were set where they could be easily seen from the kitchen window where Dad breakfasted with binoculars and field guides.

But phoebes are members of the flycatcher family. They aren't interested in handouts. All they want are bugs: gnats, mosquitoes and flies on the hoof, caught right out of the air during angular sorties that put the maneuvers of an F-16 to shame. Unknown to the phoebe, my father admired them for their work ethic, for their domesticity, their agility and especially for their stubbornness. But he was stubborn too. And he wanted them to build somewhere else. He decided on swift preventative action in the early spring, before there were any eggs in the nest. So began the great Phoebe Wars of New Road.

First came the battle of the pie tins. Dad hung one on a string so it spun and whirled on every breeze right in front of the unfinished nest. So the Phoebe began building on the other side of the doorway. My father knocked the nest down. They built it again. He knocked it down again and hung a flurry of pie tins to wave and flap and bang together in the breeze. While not much impressed with the hardware, the Phoebes finally built over the living room window instead, a spot well out of my father's reach.

But the following spring they were back under the porch. Every year it's always their first choice. And with each succeeding season they seemed less and less impressed with the shiny, noisy decorations; so the size, variety and decibel-capacity of the deterrents increased accordingly. Eventually things escalated to sheet metal, old kitchen pans, chicken wire, strips of tin foil, usually arranged to rattle and clank like the Ghost of Christmas past. Although the Phoebe were indifferent to Dickens, knocking down the unfinished nest often won the day. Several years in a row they built a second nest over the living room window. Once they built over the front porch light.

One year my father went to knock down the nest but found it was way too late. Five open mouths with pink gullets pointed at him, emitting various squeaking sounds. He determined they all had lice and he dusted each of the baby birds with delousing powder, dusted the nest and lowered it into the bottom half of a plastic milk carton which he nailed back over the doorway. The adult birds came back flustered and scolding but fed the chicks anyway. Dad didn't bother them again that year.

During winter he got to thinking that the ledge on which the birds anchored their nest was very narrow, barely an inch in width. In spring he optimistically stretched heavy tinfoil over it with no success. The next year he built a triangular ledge filler-upper that ran the length of the door. He was fairly satisfied this would stop them. Any nesting material would just slide right off, like snow on a steep roof, he thought. But he overlooked one important aspect. The triangle was hollow and he hadn't plugged the ends. That year the Phoebes built inside it. They probably thought it was a bird house.

My father carried on his bird wars until he died in 1984. For their part, the Phoebe have continued to build under the back porch, though in recent years my mother has taken up the torch of moving them out. This spring she hung up a roll of chicken wire. When the birds began building inside it, she took it down. Amazingly, they started building again in a completely new location. Their latest nest sits in an elbow of drainpipe under the roof overhang in the crook of the ``L'' formed by the dining room and the kitchen. This spot might prove to be a new favorite.

While I can't kid myself that it's been the same Phoebes all this time, I'd wager its been a long line of descendants of the original pair - birds that returned here because they felt the first tickle of the night breeze while still damp from eggs pecked open in the shelter of the porch overhang. Some internal homing device brings them back from their winter travels. If only wandering humans could find their way home so easily.

-- Mar Walker , original date 1993

Poem: The Uses of Nature (from Inverse Origami)

the Uses of Nature

Down at the interplanetary 2nd-hand nature boutique
I’d like to buy the night sky. I'll take the round full moon,
and put it in my pocket so I'll always have a coin.
I'll pick the stars, every one. I'll put some in my hatband
I'll put some across the shoulders of my coat,
and I'll stuff the rest up my sleeves so I'll
finally be luminous and amazing.
And when I am tired of being admired,
I'll take the darkness that remains and slip it over me
and become invisible so I can rest.

But look! There are lovers there under the night sky
clutching nothing, clutching everything in each other.
What will light their way when I have the moon?
What will hide them when I have the dark?
What will they wish on, when I have every star?

Hey! I could divide the moon into quarter acre lots,
and they could get a variable rate mortgage
with giant balloon payment and health insurance
and chain themselves to jobs they hate for 30 years to pay for it.
I could portion out the stars, one to every house,
An heirloom,a family treasure kept in a little box on the mantle
taken out as a conversation piece to impress visitors
I could pour the darkness into pint containers
and have it delivered to people's doorsteps
I think there's enough to go around....

----------------

by Mar (Mistryel) Walker
10/95, POEM 27 - From Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding  - c 1998

I am posting this because I read it Friday evening.  (it's 12:36 am Saturday) I read it last night really I guess, during a Google+ hangout. One poet was from India another from UK. etc etc. I just looked in, and was surprised when they called on me to do a poem. I had no work within reach so I did this one - an old stand-by from my chapbook that I have slammed with in the past. I have it memorized but I forgot changes I had made to the beginning of it.....

In honor of the eclipse: Moon Madness Strikes

In honor of the eclipse: This column appeared years and years ago in the Ridgefield Press, back when I was a reporter there .

.

Moon Madness Strikes Reporter

by Mar Walker

Some Ridgfielders had a perfect view of last Sunday's lunar eclipse.

``Did you watch the eclipse?'' I kept asking friends expectantly.

``Too cold.''

``Too late at night.''

``Saw one last year.''

Like many other disinterested parties around town,  I've always figured the stars and the planets could carry on perfectly well without me. And what I had planned for this particular event was to skip the whole thing and stay in bed.

Fortunately I was awake at midnight. On impulse, I put on some shoes and threw a coat over my pajamas. I was curious I guess, and it seems I've been cheating myself all these years. It's like the Grand Canyon was right off the porch and I'd never even looked.

Out the back door I went at a little past midnight. There was a bite out of the full moon already, just a little nibble really. It was a perfect night, utterly clear. The bright moon washed the night sky to medium grey and crisscrossed the yard with shadows. Bare trees swayed in parallel. Black limbs juggled stars in leafless hands like fussy husbands rearranging Christmas lights.

And of course there was music - the brook out back, full from the day's rain, murmured on its way to the Norwalk River. Over the scuttling of leaves and over the wistful sweetness of wind chimes on the back porch, ever so slowly, the round silhouette of Earth stretched over the moon.

As moonlight dimmed, starlight and darkness heightened. I felt cold and alive, shifting weight from one foot to the other, craning my neck like some fat bird in a courtship dance as I stared straight up.

My cat wailed at the backdoor to come out and as I turned, momentarily facing further North, I saw two bright shooting stars, one right after the other. The very long, very bright trails streaked down and I imagined I could hear the sizzle of air as they fell.

A little numb now, I ran into the kitchen and put on water for tea. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and rummaged around for a pair of binoculars. Leaving the tea to steep I went back outside.

What a revelation - with the binoculars I could make out the dark spots on the crescent of moon still showing. I studied a pale smudge to the lower right of the moon and found a cluster of stars. I focused on stars and found where I thought I saw one or two, there were entire flocks of stars drowned out by ambient light.

Alone under such surprising immensity, many thoughts came. About the fear this ancient sky-dance had once inspired. Once, before there were electric lights and television, it must have been a natural thing for men and woman to study the night sky, feeling its beauty, dwarfed by its enormity.

Now we hold nightly vigils before the TV's glitzy banality - consumer culture flashing across an 22 inch screen. What a contrast in pacing and depth when compared to an eclipse.   Our attention span is jaded by 30 second commercials. Our awe is reserved for special effects.

Instead of stepping outside and experiencing nature firsthand, we watch the highlights, rebroadcast to us as we sit on comfortable couches in warm living rooms. I know that I myself am like that. Most people I know are too.

A sudden noise caught my attention as a bright light appeared moving quickly along from the direction of New York. In the binoculars, red and white lights flanked the slender shadow of a jet. As it drew closer, low in the sky, I could see the glow of its engines spewing eerie white smoke, twin rockets in the dark. The sky is amazing and despite our drawbacks, we and our technologies are amazing too.

At one thirty a.m., when the moon had dimmed to a glimmer, and my hands had grown numb holding the metal glasses, I went in and drank my mint tea and rubbed my neck. I found if I lay flat on the floor beneath the kitchen window, body stretched under the table, I could see the moon easily without having to twist my neck. Lying on linoleum, bathed in the emerging moon, I fell asleep.

OIL PASTEL: contemplating nature

This oil pastel and watercolor on paper shows a poet i knew in Maine. I imagined him thinking about the various wonders of nature. The mountain becomes her knee.... etc. This was years and years ago when I made this drawing. A little stormy sky, a bit of visual play, a little mental/hormonal steam....

POEM: Mote in the eye of the cosmos

Mote in the eye of the cosmos

a dot, a speck of dust
one electron circling
a nucleus in a Macro-Atom,
the punctuation at the end of
the longest sentence,
a split infinitive:
to maybe cool to a dark cold rock
like so many others
or a hot dry gumball
or broken into asteroids,
or dust, melted to plasma.

But - we are here now - alive...
ALIVE. Shout it!
Live it! Here!
Right here
on this
speck.

- Mar Walker

This poem was inspired by this

Our speck in space (thanks to NASA, Carl Sagan & @Monicks)

Today I saw a version of this picture with this quotation and was in awe once again, of the vastness we move through every day on our small blue orb. And how speck-like and innocent it seems.  The picture was posted on Twitter by a person named @Monicks but the printed quote was a part of the picture and the text was hard to read to my old eyes. So I hunted up a different version of the photo (found at WikiPedia) and the quote to go with it, so I could share it in larger type So Thank you @Monicks for inspiring me. This picture was taken by the Voyager 1 as it left our solar system in 1990. The little speck inside the circle is Earth seen from close to 4 BILLION miles away.  Here is what Carl Sagan said about this picture:

"Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ---- Carl Sagan

This inspired a poem

NaPoWriMo #22 - Emporium of Earth Futures

Grey Heron in Bethel CT

Emporium of
Earth Futures

History is the track
of a flying planet
hurtling around a star
boisterous with life.
Where can we land?
What will we eat? How to
make a nest? Look!
In this fierce unfolding
we fit our lives into
what is already here,
nudge it with our living,
into something slightly
changed, die away into
what has already been.

- Mar Walker

For Earth Day 2010. Words used from the prompt include Emporium and Fierce.
I took this photo in Bethel CT last summer. Out of sight far in the lefthand foreground was an aeration fountain. The pond sits in front of an industrial building.

NaPoWriMo # 21 - Taking root

Taking Root

Abandoned on Osborne
a once handsome house:
plumbing doesn't work
no electric, no heat
doors boarded up
mold greys
the stucco now
no paint in decades
caved in roof
makes way for sky
welcomes rain.
A helicopter seed
twirls down on the wind
finds a home
grows unnoticed year
after year seeks
the light,  presses
against the still
unbroken glass
reaches through shingles
to open air, sky, sun
and this year  another
helicopter seed is released
to carry on, carried on
the streetside breeze.

Life grapples, insidious.
In imperfection: opportunity

- Mar Walker

The prompt was to write a poem on imperfection.  I took this photo a decade ago on Osborne Street in Danbury. I first noticed the tree's leaves pressing against the glass, a year before it came through the roof. It grew like that for another year or so. Sadly it's gone now, though it did reproduce - the evolutionary hallmark of success. The house still stands, looking much the same - though less interesting without the lovely tree. I used the picture once in an issue of Bent Pin Quarterly, but hadn't ever gotten around to considering a poem of my own to accompany it. So thanks ReadWritePoem for the prompt!

NaPoWriMo #20 - In praise of weeds

In praise of weeds

In junkyards, behind the garage,
through cracks in sidewalks,
in abandoned rails - life carries on
every day without applause
bent by wind, pulled up, thrown away
never nurtured or admired.
Yellow, purple, triumphantly blue
blooms, fluffy seeds come into being
despite human silence
despite our strange greed
for perfect, pampered crewcuts
of monoculture green -
when all around us the wild flowering
tirelessly fights, finds
water in stony soil,
recreates itself in borrowed light.

PAINTING: River of Sky

This is finally finished, I think anyway. It is one of those pictures where I didn't have a good composition to start with, and I fiddled and fiddled to bring the perspective into line. Originally there was a water fall in the rear as well and judging by the height of the trees in the foreground, and on how far back it was -  it must have been hundreds of feet high higher than Victoria Falls even.  It didn't make visual sense though it was very dramatic. It makes more sense to me now.

It's quite small 8 by 10 canvas board with oils. There is a cat in this picture too. Whenever i can fit one, there is a cat.

Below you can see the original design - which I liked in someways, and the stages through which it evolved. The original, I liked it but I could not accept it visually. Water doesn't fall at an angle. By perspective, and by comparison with the trees on the banks of the falls, - that water fall was ENORMOUS - taller than Victoria Falls.  Slowly I tweaked it into a form I could accept. I do like the some of the early versions for their  energy and angles etc. I like the finished painting better.

Nature's economy

I was looking out the window yesterday afternoon and noticed a big black crow on the lawn. It seemed to be watching something. Across the street in a neighbor's yard two squirrels sprinted face first down a straight tree trunk. They were moving very fast, hit the ground flat out. The first bounded across the road; the second was turned back by a car.

The lead squirrel had something in its mouth. I thought it was a hunk of  bread, and that must be what was so interesting to the crow. Then I realized the bread was wiggling, had legs and a tail. At first I thought it was a mouse, and marveled because I didn't realize squirrels were carnivorous.

When the victor squirrel got into our driveway, it stopped and started to eat the poor thing alive, opening  a bright bloody wound in its throat as it struggled. Of course I ran out yelling like a fool.  I  guess I thought it might drop its prize. As I approached I realized, this creature (whose species I had previously admired) was a cannibal. It was eating a live baby squirrel, and not a tiny infant either, a juvenile, about a quarter of his size, but still recognizable as a grey squirrel with a grey coat, white underbelly and a long but less fuzzy tail.

The crows, three at this point, were closing in too, and the squirrel leaped into nearby  tree with its poor prize clamped in its jaws. A neighbor approached and I had to explain why I was yelling.  By then I couldn't see where it went. So I went back inside the house,

Less then a minute passed and I looked out the front window. The crows had won the second round. They had the taken cannibal squirrel's meal which was now in three pieces, one bloody piece in front of each crow. And the crows were polishing off their meal. Nature is not gentle, but in its stark economy there is a great horrific beauty.  Trust me - it's not  the invention of a loving kindly god. I'd hope as a species we can have as a goal to be kinder  than nature.

I still don't know if the squirrel chasing the cannibal was the mother squirrel or a bystander like the crows, who was trying to steal dinner.

The roar at Stevenson Dam after all the rain, 3/14/2010

While traveling from the New Haven area on Sunday I took this short video of the Stevenson Dam on Route 34. Notice the incredible gush of water that is being let out of Lake Zoar at the side of the dam > you can see it in the lower right hand side of the frame . That is a lot of water. Peak was not expected until 1 p.m. the following day, according to a Danbury News Times article. This was video shot with a G3 iphone using the Qik Video app. The G3 cannot shoot video out of the box. This is a a low rez fix - but low rez but better than no rez.

http://www.youtube.com/v/zvRsLMKukJ0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0