Ants
(Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) //
There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the other that does not include you (as in, we live in Indonesia). It’s a useful distinction that English doesn’t have.
My husband reports that yes, I do write like I talk. F.Y.I., bitches.
Everybody has a special talent, their thing(s) they can do especially well. Most skills or talents can be put to use, subversively. We can be open-minded and creative about it. For example, I could be a really good messenger. Of, like, encoded messages.
This most recent translation (poem) I wrote went through really different and weird iterations. It was (uncomfortable, difficult, tricky) to write on the little line of dialogue. So heaps of in-progress verse were there waiting when the election happened. The election result was… key to re-working and finishing.
(This is a message (paraphrased) from my friend, A: When you lose a poem it gives birth to another poem about a lost poem. A poem she wrote was just published and I love it.)
I don’t really want write more poetry (or prose) that is so dark. But, well. It’s a fascinating time in history to be focusing on this specific passage from the Phaedrus. There is unfortunately more sexual violence to come. The intended purpose is therapeutic, … cathartic and transformative. My experience studying the dialogue now is so sharply different from when I was 18. When I first read it, I didn’t get it. I thought it was absurdist nonsense, a rhetorical game, reading the manipulative Lysias speech on sexual manipulation. My young mind could not wrap itself around the fact: the absurdity of (sexual, or other exploitative) violence, being educated into us, marketed, sold to us as love, is real, essential, and absolutely serious.
It breaks us. (?)
Either “The Memory of Trees” is better than I remembered or I’m just desperate for more Enya these days. It has some pretty mystical/elvish-sounding tracks but then I find myself humming the upbeat ones in the shower, this is embarrassing (fun).
Daily thunderstorms bring relief from heat with unpredictably cool gusts of wind, heavy with water. The bath garden is magical after it rains, a hot shower in the cool, drippy, cloudy-dark world. Some wood-ear fungus is growing on a nearby log, it enjoys the steam of my shower, this feels intimate. And we’re still very buggy here, more mosquitoes lately, lots of swarming ants and termites, all different sizes of those, moths, praying mantis, sweet, stingless trigona bees, mud-daubers and “murder hornets”, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids and cicadas, spiders, other spindle-legged bodies, tiny lightning bugs, all shapes and sizes of wriggling worms in the dirt, or coiling centipedes, slippery earwigs, shiny black beetles that are tiny or large, or very large and pincered, like scarabs.
Before, people wanted to protect democracy. After, people need to protect themselves from democracy. Democracy is in itself nothing (more precisely, anything). Education is the something-making.
It’s hard to say “fix your boat” to people who don’t realize they’re in a boat. Sometimes in an inflatable tube in a swimming pool on a gigantic (leviathan) cruise liner. Then I look around and wonder, what’s my boat that I don’t realize? This makes me feel very “Bill and Ted”. (Does it need fixing? Constantly, yes.)
Nature also floats, but it wasn’t built by humans.
(Yes. Yes, it does.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌗
(There were certain things that you kept from me.) //
Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, and particulate rivers of ants spanning surfaces in exploratory veins, locating and removing insect bodies, leaving translucent brown confetti, so many spent wings, scattered across the floor.
A breath, and they disperse.
A moth alit on the soap dispenser, a velvety shield of black and cream stripes against a liquid surface of stainless steel reflection.
A tiny, brightly-humming wasp building mud cradle-tubes on the bedroom door. To be woken in the morning by its sunny song.
Homestyle curry cooked on a rainy afternoon. Onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilis. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, tofu. Remembering how to improvise. It always tastes better on the second day.
A few of the baby roosters peck food from our hands now. The same few linger nearby and make eye contact, inquisitive, observant. One already has a little cockscomb, although it’s still black. (Frankie’s is a blazing red, like the chilis, with a full scarlet mask and cheek lobes.) Another has pinkish-red patches showing around his face and neck, and stunning glimpses of iridescent copper and blue, green, and purple nestled in his otherwise black feathers. One is a little smaller, with black and white marks like a tuxedo. Each child rooster looks a little different. We won’t know their “final forms” until they go through a full adult molt. That’s several months away, at least.
Frankie arrived here as a plain-looking juvenile, but then he had a dramatic transformation. Now, he is deep coppers and rich burnt caramel creams, chocolate browns blended with black, a frothy cappuccino ruff, teal patches on his sides, a forest green fountaining cascade of tail feathers, and the aforementioned bright red mask and comb. In my opinion, he is a rooster of flamboyant elegance and circumspect stature, a proudly beautiful bird, tempestuous and refined. Almost always with a faint goofy undertone.
I want to take a picture of him, but he is paradoxically hard to get a good picture of. He doesn’t appreciate having a camera (phone) put in his face.
(Some things I don’t need to know. But some things, I can’t help it, I just wish I did, about you.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.🌑
Paranormal. // Beady black ants, small and matte and anonymous-looking, crowd around some coconut water spilled on the kitchen counter, dropped crumbs on the floor, bits of sugar in a saucer, anything oily, and a small river of them courses around the perimeter of the kitchen, spilling out as a black swarm on the catfood dish. Flowing. It rained for a minute, night releasing a sigh. Now the air cools from evaporation off leaves wet and shiny in the dark. Walking outside to refill a glass, I see movement in the corner of my eye. A shadow that defies looking. Might be a ghost.
Different ants have different signals to make them go away. “Earthquake”, we tap or shake a plate, they file away, we can wash the dish. Or “typhoon”, we blow on the plate, they scatter and go, we can wash the dish. Beady black ants don’t have a signal. We tap the dish, blow on it, they spread, but they don’t leave or even disperse very much. They run around in panic circles. E. blows tobacco smoke, “forest fire”, as last resort. They don’t clear away. Can’t wash a dish or clean the counter without wiping multitudes up or putting them down the drain. They stick to dishes, even under running water. And they crawl onto anything, when upset, hands, tissues, bare feet, cats. Not aggressive, but fast, and when you accidentally squish one, the bite is a pink welt that itches and hurts for three or four days. We find them crawling on us, biting us, in our clothes, in our bed at night, in our food dishes. Pinch it off, toss on the ground. A moving blur on a glasses lense. Ant.
(The rain these past days isn’t normal, for this time of year. The ants, displaced by the rain, are not normal. A ghost that I saw in the kitchen is… more normal than the ants.)
It started with the ants. The ants are being pesky today, (small beady black ones), doing this thing they sometimes do when it rains: they come out of the ground, running in circles with nowhere to go, so they find (my) food more quickly than usual. Then a pink and purple salad with inky black elements (no, not the ants!) next to pumpkin electrifies the day. Something I love is the always-everywhere freshness of vegetables, here. Still full of midnight air. Strings of raw, grated cabbage and beet are juicy and sweet-bitter, like the best Saturday ever, (or, as Sappho says, like love). I immediately want to share, with E., who is in Java today. So I add it to a list of things that need sharing. The list will solve problems of place, and time. Whereas love solves the problem of