Skip to main content

Pandemic Journey Day 52

May 12, 2020

Today’s image – In life, there are takeaways, and then there are TAKEAWAYS. My hallowed ground, wildlife refuge trip sent me off with a significant takeaway, and one that took most of my attention today – deer ticks! Only minutes into that walk along the levee, I was commending my good providence for hiking on the slough on such a beautiful but chilly day, and glibly remarking to myself about the absence of mosquitoes.  My comeuppance arrived around 9:00 pm last night as I noticed a little tickle of something moving across my hand. I looked up from my book – augghhhh! TICK! TICK! TICK!  The red lights in my brain flashed as the sirens of my amygdala screamed.  I search my arms and legs; I felt around my scalp and armpits. I looked at my pup, and a primal nitpicking session commenced as I combed his fur and my head with frantic fingers.  Dozens of ticks had hitchhiked home on us from the tall marsh grasses. Before retiring, I stripped down and re-searched every crevice.  Still at 3:00 am, they woke me like a bad dream, and I was picking ticks from my pillow and sheet and more from my dog, telling myself here was the reciprocity of the marsh, an eye for an eye and a parasite for a parasite.  With the finest of aversions, I was participating in a relationship that predates humans by one hundred million years.  Yes, the ticks came first, some say, out of the Cretaceous Period. Maybe my loathing of them is a trained one, and perhaps it’s not the ticks that I am so fearful of but the pathogens that they carry and pass along.

Given the mild-ish winter we experienced, I hear that insect populations will be impressive this summer, and from the looks of things, so will arachnids. They will be food for something we appreciate more, I suppose. And also conveyance for microbes that bring illnesses to complicated matters in this COVID shakedown. Here is more writing on the wall; this is not a great way to end a school year or start the summer season.  I am feeling like loose change in a flush eco-economy.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more

Likely Liable

Daylight cracks its brittle seam snapping apart a wish bone night. Venus has mounted Jupiter already headed for the barn; water simmers in a cracked kettle, just enough for two. And you, dark man, curled like a leather belt in the back of a dresser drawer, unfurl; I’m curled too, like paperback pages in August; we’ll meld mauve dreams and first light. I study you like a self portrait, you hover pretending to understand the chaos of shoes about the room, they lay like punctuations, a tactile Morse Code. I study these dots and dashes, you haunt my sleepy head; we crawl under apostrophes behind question marks. Your gesticulations play havoc with runway lights as I struggle to lower landing gear. Our best intentions for enhancing this entry, have arrived confused. Even so I’m grateful for awkward aubades, dark coffee and you inside my skin.
1 comment
Read more

Momentous

This moment is liquid, breached with spring peepers, It is sandalwood smoke lifting prayers to Lakshmi, Lifting standard bearers, it ups the ante. It is a cool breeze up a cervical column,   shivering  in Morse code, a genetic ladder to the roof, to Jupiter to a far black hole in one. Nebulas yawn a kaleidoscopic Neverland promenade, and gravity waves sing their arias of emptiness and full again, in nano-rhyme, in tiny grand statements. This moment is rich in grandchildren and great grandchildren, grows thin with constant attention, runs curious as coyote, moans in silken orgasm. This moment is ready as 4 o'clock. It swirls perdition within paradise, it bobs on Adriatic waves, swells with orphans adrift, threatens to wash us away. It uncurls sad lingering memory, clings to vital shadow kin. This moment is mitosis: gold to lead, sunflowers to chickadees, you to me. It has folded the day into 366 paper cranes, each head upturned. Thi...
Post a Comment
Read more