poem 11

Telling you this now is like holding
a flattened penny between my palms,
is like watching you out of the corner
of my eye in the morning, your eyes
getting used to the light. I’m telling you

I want to believe in god and here I am
pushing myself toward love with such velocity
that I think maybe a South American
poet could fall in love with me
now. We will break each other’s hearts.

I will learn exactly how
Borges feared the sea.

I will take that fear and bend it
into a tunnel that only this poet
and I could live in, huddled up
without waiting. Once I fell in love

with every stranger I ever met.
I would tell them how our days began
destined to meet each other,
fall in love and make each other
feel worth a damn.

It’s not until I give myself over
that even the sea will see
fit to take me.

Know: I want to run into something
hard with my body. Like spit
first hitting the oil, I want to fry.

I will go driving in the countryside,
die at the sound of a barn swallow,
myself and the machine
intimate with a strong tree.


-summer2009
marlo barrera

Glass Flowers: the Ware Collection and Poem 10

Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were glass artists from Dresden, Germany commissioned by Harvard University from 1887 to 1936 to create realistic replicas of plants.  At the time there was no way to preserve and showcase plants to the public in their original, live state so glass was used instead.  The two men made thousands of these models with no apprentices or help.

I got a book called Glass Flowers in Nashville, TN at Bookman, Bookwoman Books.  It was printed in 1940 and has drawings by Fritz Kredel of 16 of the pieces from the Ware Collection, all with a focus on pollination.  Each plate has a substantial description of the pollination of each flower.

It is the most beautiful book that I own.

Here are three of my favorite plates illustrated in the book.  Click on them for a better look.

  

The collection is at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

-----

Here is a poem of mine from 2008.  I have been posting older things because currently I am working on writing a bird field guide and a collection of nests.  They have me preoccupied.

Recently, the two of us love with both
our hands, fondle sad things like hems,
corners, the edges of cherry orchards.

This is said to have made us both a little less
lonely seeming—we have suddenly become

landlocked. I speak brokenly in clock-tongue,
now. I only crane my neck. I know
only what it means to pray.
This is the North,

we discovered.
The definitive.
The North. So looking at you now
is like watching the compass settle,

finally. Today on the steps of a church was a woman
mourning someone her head thrown back,
hands pressed tightly to her chest without delicacy.

Help me identify these feathers, please!

Here are some feathers I have found and been given in the last year.  I am sure what a couple of them are but I guess not so confident.  For the life of me I could not figure out how to put text on the images so here is some information.

These two feathers are both pretty large.  The first one (a) is about 7.5 inches while the other one (b) is just slightly bigger.  (a) was found in Oberlin, OH and (b) what found in Pittsburgh, PA.  I suspect (b) is some sea bird.

This next group is great.  They will be named (c) through (g) from left to right.  They are all much smaller than (a) and (b).  All five were found in Oberlin, OH.  

**UPDATE: (c) is from a Northern Flicker Woodpecker (there are 7 species of woodpecker in Ohio) and (f) is a confirmed blue jay feather.  Hooray!

Here are their sizes:

(c) about two inches long

(d) two inches (I LOVE this one)

(e) almost three inches

(f) This one is my favorite.  It is about four inches long.  The other side does not have the pretty blue markings, only the black and white.  I suspect this is from a blue jay.

(g) I think this one is from a cardinal.  It is about 4 inches.

Please post any inklings of suspicions or pass this blog around to people who might know.   Also, if you have a feather you loved once or haven't had the chance to love and want to get rid of it, send it my way.  Just ask for my mailing address.  In return I will send you something nice.  We could trade things.

Here are some other things I collect:

-field guides and nature guides (especially those that are hand drawn or a strange sort of topic--- I have one only for eggs-- and those that are full page drawings too.)

-navigation guides and guides on what things I can eat (i.e. edible wild plants, mushrooms)

-particularly beautiful compasses (I only have one right now.  It's always in my pocket.)

-stuff with birds on it

-old found egg shells

-abandoned nests from birds that won't return to them for the next mating season

-snake skins

-any other sort of beautiful and nice things (I have many buckeyes because I love them and old broken black walnuts, a mermaid's purse)

-dead bugs (i.e. intact bees, moths and butterflies, shells of scary big things)

Also, please let me know if you have any ideas of how to store or display these feathers!

Thanks for your help!

9. Another one today.

While watching your girlfriend
on the shore of Lake Monroe
you tell me how this lake was built
on a place called Paynetown
which I heard as Paintown
and saw it fitting that the corps of engineers drowned
the place out after flattening out
the homes that maybe housed your anscestors
or history once. Here is where I remember
how afraid you are of dogs
and although you don’t like swimming much either,
you go out into the lake further
and I go with you.

Pay(in)etown is still
drowning beneath us
while your girlfriend is up on Flat Rock
drawing us maybe, only our heads
like irrelevant buoys;
our first portrait maybe,
after knowing each other for years.
 


-october 2009

8: a haiku 2/24/2010

Here is a strong love-

r.  There was a drought this year.

They both came at once.

Here is a postcard I made:

Poem 7: Untitled Sequence

There is a reunion
inside me between
my throat and an old
dried up seed.
I am full
of hunger.

I tried to grow
a garden once
but the dirt was no river
mud. Watering
amounted to nothing.
Sunshine amounted
to nothing. Love
amounted to nothing.

A year later you and I
grew pansies together
in a yogurt cup
on your typewriter’s case
near the window.

We’ve been seeing them
sprout but we are waiting
for them to bloom.

My throat,
the old seed,
the pansies
are not enough.
The four of us are
waiting for you
to come home.
The pansies are
waiting to bloom.

*
This is a handsome
mess. I’m settled in dead
or abandoned things I have
seen, in dead or abandoned
things we have seen
together. I am a collector
of old nests, lost feathers,
dead bees. My mid section
is marked by a stale waterline
so New Orleans is left in the depth
of my pockets as an unlucky coin.
My thoughts of you are set in:
two dead
deer,

Here:
I. Route 80
There were no birds of prey.
With the interior of a deer
splayed out next to it on a late
night road, the thing seems mammoth
in size. The animal was lonely there;

is there now as a dead sad thing
and its innards there breaking hearts,
later as an anonymous bloody thing,
is breaking hearts. It could have been human.

II. Route 34
An earlier death
occurred to me first as beautiful
and full. The animal was intact.
The antlers stuck out from the ditch.

The vultures were collecting, then
at once buried their bodies in its body.


I like missing you
through the loss of things,
seeing you through the wait
for our yogurt cup garden.
I am caught between an old nest
and imagining a live deer.

*
You’ve seen this before
but now it looks like I’ve spent long enough
on this coast to see its violence ending
in death like an electrical current
not ending in death.




After the second, we stopped on Route 80
In the bathroom I read (in two handwritings),
you’re the one for me /
and I love you with no reservations.

I told you, wrote it down, am saving it
for a postscript in your next note,
after reminding you about the two dead
deer we saw once in October, after reminding
you to remind me to water the pansies tonight.

------marlo barrera december 2009