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Friday 23 January 2009

Living Things (2) -- by Beyond the Pale

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14 comments:

Zephirine said...

There's no significance in the box round these two poems! It's just that the only way I can get Blogger to keep the layout of the lines and not push everything to the left, is to fool it that this is a picture...

file said...

misread the opening line as "..lotus in heat" at first which sort of sent me in another direction

powerful evocation as ever B, the magi assembles the ingredients...

Anonymous said...

I like the feeling of the raccoons and cats busy about their own purposes, moving from room to room, coming and going, occupied during our sleeping time... the other worlds going on while we're not looking.

Anonymous said...

and that raccoon is impossibly cute.

offsideintahiti said...

Raccoons sometimes sound like human infants wailing in the night. Not cute, very disturbing. Especially if you didn't know.

Anonymous said...

Yes, the night cries are not cute but alarming. (Though as Zeph says, the baby in the photo is adorable enough.) Ours are often heard squalling through the night. (The cats are wise enough to know better than to look into it.) There are territorial battles, defenses of the young. Theirs is a precarious and fraught existence in urban places, of course.

Many times will see them slinking in and out of storm drains by night, in the streets around here.

Ours live up in a big redwood adjacent. They descend at night to squabble and roust about. We leave food out for them, no doubt instigating some of the battles (and certainly infuriating the neighbours, who regard the raccoons as a nuisance and are wont to summon the "exterminator"... but one of the several reasons our homestead is regarded as a questionable zone).

And they scramble around by night on the battered tarpaulins that comprise our roof. It is covered by their droppings. This is at least proof they're getting fed. (By all evidence, it appears they'll eat practically anything. This likely not a matter of unrefined taste so much as desperation to survive. Which at any rate they do not do for long. Around here, a two year old raccoon is a survivor and a veteran...)

I've stepped out into their nocturnal frays and been confronted by a big mother coon defending her young. The one who backed down was me.

Anonymous said...

I have foxes in the patch of rough land next door, and they make some horrible noises...there's a sort of clacketing sound like you imagine a vulture would make, which really freezes the blood. I suppose it's a big nasty version of the sound cats make when they chatter their teeth.

Nature, eh, innit marvellous.

Anonymous said...

Has anybody read "Man in the dark", by Paul Auster? It came back to me when I gave those a second reading. Particularly the second rêverie. I was going to write a "recommended reading" thingy about that one, but successfully managed to put it off until Zeph pulled the plug on the series. Phew.

Anonymous said...

"Man in the dark"=permanent location.

Anonymous said...

(By the way, speaking of man in the dark, when I first drafted that obscure reverie in gmail, the all-wise always-idiotic gmail marginal advert column, which voyeurizes everything one types and offers related products, did its best to sell me Sterilized Owl Pellets --"Low cost on shipping, free guide and probes".)

Anonymous said...

Pellets for sterilised owls?
Pellets made of sterilised owls?

and I don't want to think about the probes...

Anonymous said...

Zeph,

Me neither.

Offie,

Forgot to mention, back in the days when the world was young and not yet endarkened, I went to a baseball game or two with Paul A.--who was/is an avid fan of that sport. Very nice fellow too, as well as of course fair-to-middling with the old palabras.

(And back in those golden days to which I refer he was not yet a novelist, but a practitioner of the world's oldest profession--one in which, as I understand, only geniuses need apply... I refer of course not to paddling but to translating--of French poetry as it happens, in Paul's case.)

Anonymous said...

"fair to middling", yeah, you could say that.

He's one of my favourites, if not "the". French channel LCI ran an interview with him only last week. Unfortunately, times zones and all that, it was in a middle of the night here. I'm sure he had a lot to say about the change of administration. And maybe baseball.

Translating poetry must be a nightmare.

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