Crater Lake at Christmas

Lines penned in 2016 upon beholding the lake snow-clad. 

'Tis a fashionable blunder
In naming the eighth wonder
To not take in account
Our fine lake-in-a-mount.
Ah the joy here! 
Is there a greater, truer?
(Is there a crater bluer?)

Unison

 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..., it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ..."
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, 
it was the worst of times, 
it was the age of wisdom, 
it was the age of foolishness, 
it was the epoch of belief, 
it was the epoch of incredulity, 
it was the season of Light, 
it was the season of Darkness, 
it was the spring of hope, 
it was the winter of despair.

It was a time for the worst,
it was a time for the best,
it was the era of greed,
it was the era of contentment,
it was the hour of need,
it was the hour of magnanimity,
it was the sentence of sloth,
it was the sentence of industry,
it was the solstice of incongruence,
it was the equinox of symmetry.

But, it must be said,
it was not the crossroads of triumph,
nor the crossroads of disaster.
People remember it that way,
but there's more nostalgia in that than truth.
Likewise,
it was not the rule of warmth,
it was not the rule of cold,
wasn't the cycle of love,
wasn't the cycle of indifference,
not the chapter of comfort,
not the chapter of angst.
By utterly no means was it the chapter of angst.

A closer reading of history will prove that,
in reality,
it was the tenure of solitude,
it was the tenure of company,
it was the spell of calm,
it was the spell of wrath,
it was the adolescence of disarray,
it was the dotage of indulgence.

Maybe it was the aeon of vanity,
maybe it wasn't,
but I'm one hundred percent certain that
it was the aeon of humility.
Then again,
it was the semester of silence,
it was the semester of prolixity,
it was the nanosecond of haste,
it was the millennium of patience,
so alright, I'm not all that sure.

I have been going around saying
it was the eyeblink of serendipity,
and sometimes the eyeblink of ill fortune,
that it was the jiffy of surfeit,
and--against all odds--the jiffy of shortfall.
So picture my astonishment when I looked up my diary
and saw, in my own writing, that actually
it was the heartbeat of crisis,
it was the heartbeat of harmony,
it was the two shakes of a lamb's tail of ailment,
it was the two shakes of a lamb's tail of health.

To think that if certain events had transpired a tiny bit differently,
it could have been the interlude of movement,
it could have been the interlude of stillness,
could've been the twilight of superstition,
could've been the dawn of reason, 
would have been the history of the beginning,
if not the beginning of history.

At any rate, back then they said soon
it will be a time for the best,
it will be a time for the worst,
it will be the session of passion,
it will be the session of chastity,
it will be the debut of suspense,
it will be the swansong of reminiscence.

Well, look around.
It ain't the debut of suspense,
it ain't the bloody swansong of reminiscence,
it is the bout of voracity,
it is the bout of temperance,
it is the cadence of faith,
it is the cadence of empiricism,
it is the Jurassic of habit,
it is the Atomic of invention.

That is why I don't like making imprecise statements about durations.
But I do have a pretty sharp memory for the spatial aspects of times.
I can tell you, for instance, that
it was the best of places,
it was the worst of places,
it was the kingdom of heaven,
it was the kingdom of limbo,
it was the chamber of glass,
it was the chamber of secrets,
it was the land of the gleeful,
it was the home of the grave,
it was the epicentre of action,
it was the shell of idyll,
the ballpark of conjecture,
the bullseye of accuracy,
the right of apathy,
the left of candour,
the surface of politeness,
the depth of compassion.

Believe me, I had taken measurements. 

Collateral Adjectives: an Introduction

It looks like a long poem but 

something about the opening line 

gets my attention.

I quite like how it cuts to the chase 

with the metaphor of 

adopting a dog versus an infant.

How it patiently elaborates 

that neither aqueous nor watery 

would have a life of its own without water, 

but that only one of them 

can be mistaken for a biological child 

of the noun.

I don't know about you, but

I personally find that a nice explanation 

of the titular subject.

Which is why I don't mind

when a couple more examples 

are shoehorned in, like end vs terminal, 

and moon vs lunar.

There is even a joke 

about collateral and loan words 

that I'm willing to give a polite chuckle.

At the same time I also begin to suspect here

that the poem is perhaps not really about collateral adjectives, 

that maybe it wants to do something else altogether,

something that reminds me of adjective vs epithetic.

Out of nowhere then comes this river in South Bend, Indiana.

There is that phrase, 

ribbon of sparkling silver, 

which I love, but there are also those two names, 

St Joseph and Sakiwasipi.

So presumably this is another metaphor.

That much is confirmed in the next line,

when we learn that St Joseph is the version

that freezes over, runs in 

straight lines, or beneath 

unsightly bridges, or by 

the crowded pier at Lake Michigan 

into which it merges and 

disappears against the clouded sunset beyond,

whereas when called Sakiwasipi the river

ripples under cackling geese 

and meanders 

under luminous spring clouds,

once having overdone it and

leaving behind 

a lake shaped like a horseshoe,

perfectly still,

a giant mirror 

into which bright yellow trees 

hang upside down, pointing 

to the clear blue sky 

at the bottom. 

It's not obvious to me what I'm supposed to make 

of that frenzy of imagery -- 

but I am left with no time 

to turn it over the swivels of my brain, 

because the poem now puts its arms together in front of it

and dives into a second big analogy.

This is when it gets tiresome, technical -- 

yes, I get that no single ancestor 

gave bats and dolphins 

their common blessing of echolocation, 

but do I really care that nor did 

one etymological great-grandmother 

spawn east and oriental?

That word, convergent evolution, 

makes me wince: 

it should have no place in poetry.

I want to go to the next stanza already.

Only it turns out to be 

a curiously defensive one, like

it is trying to prove a point.

Speaking for myself, though, I felt it had its moments,

like the spiel about how some collaterals

function as euphemism. 

The one with cystic vs bladder,

the one about mortal remains for dead body,

and my favourite, gluteal vs buttock.

But hang on, hymeneal vs marriage

shouldn't belong here.

That sounds to me like 

the opposite of euphemistic. 

We then go off on 

an unnecessary moralistic tangent on what it feels like to

savour stewed goose and smoked steak versus 

bite into birds and bison.

I suppose that was for those s's and b's.

Next we are abruptly dropped into the periodic table 

and asked to contemplate stannic acid 

and ferrous oxide and Auric Goldfinger.

Then it gets awkward with 

all those obscure collaterals for common nouns, though I dig the one on 

hodiernal vs today. Yummm.

Also, estival vs summer. 

Estival cracks me up.

The final bit here is for me the best, 

the one with all the sneaky types, 

you know, the ones we use all the time 

but don't think of as collaterals.

Like I am startled that second and best

slipped under my radar just now.

To be honest, the next stanza loses me completely.

Do I really need to use digital exchange 

in place of fingers crossed? 

Sure, feline and canine precipitation 

faintly tickles me,

but xeric uniformity? Colour me unimpressed. 

That's not even what "just deserts" really means.

That also goes for the one on 

carpal gyration vs wrist spin.

And maybe I'm just too cynical at this point, 

but dextral absence for right away 

strikes me as too clever by half. 

I sense the poem is in panic mode now,

as if guilty of having 

bullet lists masquerading as its stanzas.

Pitiful, really.

  

I am pretty inspired, though, 

to see it recover to hit some high notes 

in the final stanza.

Those nouns lacking collaterals 

do make a good theme for wrapping things up.

Like when we are challenged 

to produce one for sin or Portugal or TV, 

I, for one, fail to.

And it is odd indeed that window has fenestral 

and door has nothing.

Pet haters? Ha, that's a good name -- 

having me doubt if the original metaphor 

was set up for this payoff.

(Then the volume of my mind 

inexplicably turns down as I read 

that side remark on how sooner or later 

I'd be thinking of the collateral shelter 

as one boasting no unclaimed animals.)

And I really like the way the examples 

in this category are juxtaposed.

The cake, guillotine, democracy sequence 

is a nice touch, for instance.

But also coffee, bean, cup. 

It gets me when we then immediately go

from coffee to scatological.

Seeing how the clock on the poem 

is running out, I become curious 

about how it is going to end. 

That is when I am a trifle jarred, 

but mostly amused, to discover that, 

in its own words, 

"As a poem do I long to sound,

 as thy eyeballs come southbound."

Fancy.

Oregon Pacific

Come morning tide up the wayside,

By whales and wharfs and dunes I glide,

I slide by rock, mount, bridge and bay.

I wave, I roar, I leap, I pour,

With briny tongues lap up the shore,

Through cliff, cape, chasm find a way.

I shape the shell and wash Thor's Well,

Entrance the lighthouse clientele,

And arches, churns and punchbowls spray.

And as the beach I sweep to reach,

I catch Ponsler's pebbles in speech,

Or stumps and wrecks rue their birthday.

Proceedings of The Ornithology Society

             
"Was it a warbler you met?
Does it fly? Get wet?
A brand new breed of bird?
We stand in need of word."

"Aye, a brand new breed of bird,
The kind of which's unheard.
To describe her we need
Words of phrasal breed.

Finefangled is she, and in new fettle,
She builds her dint with loggerheads and lays eggs in a kettle.
Her dudgeon's short and shrift is high,
A riddance reddish in her cry:
A brand new breed of bird,
And that's just the first third.

Her down -- at least from what I saw --
Was spick and beck, and kith and haw,
Kit and whit, and not a caboodle.
All in all, a jetsam doodle
Was the brand new breed of bird
That I had encountered.

She bandies a shebang raringly,
Drinks neap and petard sparingly;
She wears her bill in kilter,
Up skelter and fro helter.
A brand new breed of bird,
A true crossword absurd."

Descent of the Daystar

He's up there, high up, and I frown as I re-consult my sunset tables.
All right, it is nigh; the final sweep always the swiftest, I remind myself.
I perceive with amusement the masculine pronoun that has travelled from Coleridge into my mental notes.
Was some Ra-like one in the back of the mariner's head, or did he only contrive a convenient rime for "sea"?
Lo, the hasty farewell has begun, the headlong plunge to the horizon, like a -- the azures are crimsoning -- like a marathon athlete who's saved the coal in her muscles for the end sprint.
I dig my fingers deep in the sand and watch.
Something's very wrong about these settings and risings, I say to myself, like the old streetside trick with the magician vanishing the coin and retrieving it from behind your ear. 
I can more eagerly digest the Norwegian fireball that swirls about my head than the African version that swings from scalp to sole and back.  
The blazing rim is but a whisker's breadth from the steel-blue parapet of ocean. 
I lean forward, almost hoping to hear a clang.
The doughnut is poised to dunk.
No, the coffee is poised to rise -- the sun ain't setting; 'tis the earth rushing up to draw a curtain over it,
And as I balance this astronomical technicality in my brain, my eyes wander, and I miss my moment:
The sea has already taken a bite out of him.
And that initiates the ebbing of light; the grays begin to surround me, deepening in sudden jerks as the planet's eyelids droop.

"Isn't it a lovely sunset, Mr Robert Frost?" remarked a young lady at the balcony of a party, to which replied he, "I never discuss business after dinner."

I roll the anecdote across the draft for a groove to slide it in, stopping only to witness the shiny bald top of the glorious thing slip quietly into the waves.

I become aware I'd been holding my breath, which I unclasp as I prepare to disembark the dune.
On the climb down I turn to the wispy clouds and warn them, Soon, out of your sight, too.
As far as I can tell the universe is now a whimsical gallery of purple and orange, the silhoutte of my sedan somewhere in it -- a bridge to the world of dinner, detergent and bed.
I trudge my reluctant way thither, which is when I'm struck by the happy thought that the photonic sun has set; the neutrinous knows no nightfall.

-------

Update on Sep 2022:
I only just came to know of John Updike's Cosmic Gall that expands on the last line.

Lines on a Mile High Holiday

Last Tuesday I caught an off-season hill station by surprise.
Ever since, I've been itching to chronicle the things I saw -- "saw".
But I curb myself.
Travelogue, I've come to suspect, is soft writing,
A home-delivered pizza that keeps the saucepan of imagination unlit.
It altogether eliminates having to look a reticent blank page in the eye all day in hopes of teasing inspiration out. 
It guarantees sleep.
It hires a secretary and dismisses the muse.
"Describe the pictures in your head in 500 words or less."
And that, reader, is why I'm not gushing about the orchid petals and the snaking river and the bison and the kurinji blossom and the spotted deer and the luscious kamala oranges and the coffee berry -- or their lack thereof.
Not because they, in absentia, were not fine pegs to hang a tale by, but because I am not that flavour of writer. 
Not because my sleeve isn't brimming with lines like "Seen sights are curious, those unseen are curiouser and curiouser", but because in general I prefer to talk about, say, a stripe of moonlight cutting through the heart of a lovelorn damsel, or strive to fly the word "spezzatura"  amidst the rough weather of an ode and land it on a stanza without crashing it.
Much rather would I indulge in such unashamed birotechnics, than clamp sentences onto sensations past, a labour that bears out little more than powers of portrayal.
Vast as the fascinating gulf between truth and travel brochure is, I oughtn't to give in.
And therefore, with resolute heart, the orchid plant no longer a-bloom will have to be pinched by the stem and pulled whole out of my poem, and tossed to the margins, 
Where it will have to jostle for space with the Cauvery stealing her chilly way under the floor of the cave that wriggles all the way to Mysuru, 
The leafy grounds said to heave beneath the hooves of mountain bison at night,
The kurinjis expected to awaken next spring only to squint at the skies and wind the alarum up for another dozenyear, 
The Deer Park closed on Tuesdays presumably to annoy the town barber,
The unripe oranges swaying in the breeze -- emerald pendulums -- as if impatient to live up to their name,
And the first coffee flower I ever saw.

At the Beach

A wave slides in, and covers

the Pacific dioxides of Si.

A boat in the distance hovers

like an oil drop of Mi.