Take care of your goldfish

In the October 16 NYT Trilobites blog, we learned, what some of us have long suspected, fish get depressed. "The trigger for most domestic fish depression is likely lack of stimulation," reported Heather Murphy. Fish are naturally curious, Murphy quotes Dr. Victoria Braithwaite who recommends adding new objects to your fish tank, or moving them around.

Since at least in 2008, it has been common knowledge that low levels of anti-depressants are making their way out of our bodies, through the waste stream, and into the ocean (and back into our supply of drinking water). Fairly contained bodies of water, like Puget Sound, don't get flushed thoroughly. Here's a recent summary from 2016 on Vice (and abstract for the underlying research.)

For my Bay Area friends: Drugs in Water.

Here's a poem from five years ago about barnacles and the gasping ssri sea.

If you recall Darwin made his name in barnacles before publishing On the Origin of Species. His friend and mentor, Joseph Hooker, told Darwin that he and his fellow scientists would have little confidence in any speculation about the possibility of species evolving if it came from someone who had not done the real, nitty-gritty taxonomic work of describing some group in detail. Darwin replied to Hooker: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark.” He chose barnacles; he'd collected many in his travels. (Source: Naming Nature.)

In 1854, after 8 years of studying barnacles, Darwin wrote, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow moving ship."

Just do what you can do. Take care of your goldfish.

Unadulterated

Unadulterated

Outside the Krol hearing

a witness sits

in a holding room,
the door cracked open

so he could breathe.

A paper cup

stained red by worried lips

desiccates under fluorescent light.

White hair buzzing, she flares

gray over me.

You have no place here

so help me god!

As if god or some judge
could ever stop her.

The maroon smeared across the linoleum
must be coffee.

This is a rewrite of Periodic Evaluation. The previous title didn't do much, and I've referenced Krol hearing directly,which while more arcane, is google-able and precise. The new title is also probably too cryptic, but I like the word. There are 4 ways in which the "she" is unadulterated:
1. No lipstick, no hair color ... her natural self
2. Yes, institutionalized, she is taking her meds, but they aren't really changing anything.
3. Allusion to adultery.
4. Like meds, neither god nor the judge is changing anything.

I've tried to clarify the pronouns, and that it was the "she" talking. There are 2 things I worry about in this rewrite: have a lost any immediacy or surprise or velocity? And can the reader see her barging in--the shock, the surprise of her entering the supposedly safe conference room. I've tried many ways to make this more clear, but haven't found one I like.

Rewrite of Bordeaux poem

Rampage

The glass tapers so the wine avoids the tongue
and worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge the waitress says something I miss.
The glass breaks like an egg. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold the glass still
aloft so she could see. A peony slumped on the asphalt
defeated by the morning dew. A crumpled bird that smacked
a window. Is wine contained like yoke in a broken belly?
My palm is wet. Red drains down my wrist, pastes jeans
to my leg. Dig out the shard. Make blood run like wine.

Link to previous version. I tried to fix some problems. 1. Old title did very very little--making sure the reader knew the wine was red and that the glass was more tapered than, say, a burgundy glass. 2. "More glasses would survive" was trite, and symptomatic of the shock I was in (Jack) at the time. It undercut the point of the poem which was my prayer for rage.

More on songbirds, from Annie Dillard

Nature is vaster than we will ever perceive.

"Our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.

"[Their] show would play to an empty house, as do falling stars which fall in the daytime.

"That is why I take walks."

From pages 72, 73 of the 1982 edition of Teaching a Stone to Talk.

"When Women Were Birds"

From Terry Tempest Williams, pg 205 of When Women Were Birds,

Once upon a time
when women were birds
there was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn
and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world with joy.

TTW cites the hermit thrush; the song sparrow.

Eve took the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and is no longer a bird. On pg 89, TTW writes "What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness."

The garden is filled with mosquitoes, thorns, predators and prey. We are predators. A wasp stings; poison ivy burns. Biting the apple is revelation. A garden more clearly perceived is a wild place.

TTW concludes "there is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside, not as a secret, but as a prayer. "  The sacred is that which must be kept private.

Pg 92, "The world begins with yes."

The 5 Types of Poems

1. Songs
2. Companion calls
3. Territorial aggression (often male to male)
4. Adolescent begging
5. Alarms

Found in What the Robin Knows by Jon Young.

Reading Heinrich's "A Year in the Maine Woods"

Build a nest-level blind in a maple tree.
Clear shrubs near seep for a pond.
Cut brush for a view of the mountain
or for a grassy bank down by the brook.
These naturalist memoirs seduce us
as the authors themselves are seduced
by a shiny new purpose--an old apple orchard
returned to the sun--brewing coffee on a stove
fueled by hardwood you limbed, hauled, sawed
and split. Honest about midges and horseflies,
but seductive the way washing your car is not.
Unless you don't have a car
and you hear Sheryl Crow and it's sunny
and the hot is softened by a pretty steady breeze
blocks inland but still smelling of Sound.