get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see the dew bespangling herb and tree
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Carvings

February 6th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (1 Comments)

I was out in the cold with the baby.
Driven from the house by his sick sisters,
We’d gone to find something to do.
National Geographic was between exhibits
So we walked down to the White House
Against a cold, damp wind.
Which explains why I ended up at the Renwick
With a two-year old.

On the first floor
Was an exhibit of art
By Japanese Americans interred at camps
After Pearl Harbor.

Delicate paintings of desolate camps
against stark mountains.
How could they have made such beautiful images
Of a camp they had been forced to live in without cause?

Small, polished wooden birds
Painted lifelike from pictures in National Geographic magazines
They’d requested at the camp.
The birds looked as if they would nestle in your hand
Smooth and warm, talismans.

Two large wooden cranes danced together with long, smooth necks
And long, smooth legs and plump bodies that showed the natural roughness of the wood.
There was a long, curved stick with a snake’s head carved into one end
And a snake’s rattle into the other.

There were wooden dressers, a foot or so high, with polished wooden panels
Made from different types of wood scraps collected from around the camp.
Dolls with beautiful clothes, a train, a boat.
The pieces were beautiful, stunningly so.
Many of the things I liked the most were created by farmers
Who, according to the accompanying materials, returned to farming when they were released.

I wish I could have looked harder, stayed longer, seen more
But as I said, I was accompanied by a two year old
Who started to shriek
Until I let him tackle the Renwick’s long, imposing staircase to the second floor.

I went back a week or so later without him,
But the exhibit was gone. I’d caught it right before it left.
That’s my life these days—such findings outside of my daily routine
Are like the flashes of a town seen from a train and then gone again
As the train continues past the usual thin screeds of forest.

But enough about me.
These artists had been forced into internment camps by the U.S. government, forcibly removed from their homes and lives. In some cases families had been separated–
the mother and children sent to one camp, the father to another.
The victims of such injustice
Created beauty while they were interred.
They must have worked on these pieces day after day,
Imagining them, collecting materials, working with what they had
And with what they imagined.

I can have no excuse not to do the same.

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Fish tank

January 18th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

In our fish tank now, we have the four linia perugae we started with, the first five babies, adolescent now in size, and three new babies.  Alarmed at the pace at which the linia perugae are multiplying, I looked online for some predators of fry, and we now have seven black skirt tetras.  Whether or not they’ll eat newly hatched fry, I don’t know.  They aren’t bothering the three babies in the tank, but they were a week or so old before the tetras joined the community.  In addition to the tetras, we have six glo fish my kids picked out, two red, two orange, and two yellow.  I added six gold barbs (also picked by the children), and one Chinese algae fish, and our tank is a full community.  The fish are still getting used to each other, but their innate personalities have emerged.   The silver tetras, shaped like flat diamonds, with dramatic black fins above and below, police the tank, swimming back and forth in formation, nipping here and there, occasionally shoaling, which I love (I increased the school to  7 in the hopes they would do more).  The linia perugae remain the puppies of the community, friendly to all, swimming here there and everywhere and always flocking over to the glass when they see me.  The glo fish swim up towards the top of the tank, never in any particular formation, although the two yellow ones in chase each other around.  The barbs cluster together, first on one side of the tank, then behind the big castle, then in the center.  And the Chinese algae eater hides in one of the two castles between algae collecting forages towards the center of the tank, its body twisting and flicking up and down as it sucks on the stones or castle or glass.  The fish tank has a castle on either side, both of which have foliage around them; the big one has  a bunch of green that floats above it, while the little one has a different green plant growing in front of it, where the babies like to rest.  And I just planted a lovely silver and white plant in the center of the tank to distract from the heater behind it. 

My father had two fish tanks when I was little; a salt water tank and a fresh water tank.  He spent hours on them.  I never helped, although I dreamt of the fish sometimes, alarming dreams where the fish grew big and leapt from their tanks and crowded towards me.  I didn’t think I was interested in fish tanks until we got one at the request of my daughter.  A fascination lay dormant in me until I started one of these little worlds, so artificial and yet full of the essentials of the natural world; birth and death, competition, community.  As a parent, you impart what you impart when your kids are young, and it’s easy to think that you see while they are young what sticks and what does not.  But here I am, still discovering the influences of my father.   

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New

January 2nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

We got a fish tank for my daughter’s birthday and put it in our dining room.
A friend gave us four fish: linia parugiae, unassuming, silver-gray fish
that endeared themselves to me by immediately swimming to the glass of the tank when I approached, just as the dogs rouse themselves from the couches and walk over to me when I come downstairs.

Our dinner hour has become their dinner hour: they bunch together in the middle of the glass pane closest to our table as we sit and eat, eyes goggling, fins swiveling, willing us to come and let loose their flakes. Almost immediately, within days, we became companionable, these linia perugae, native to streams of the Dominican Republic, and I.

A couple of weeks later, my eye caught an extra flash of something in the tank as I sat next to them at the table, and I looked again, harder.
It was another one, a tiny sliver of a thing, smaller than a baby’s fingernail, transparent but fully there, swimming up against the safety of some seaweed. I looked harder and found three more. The fish had had babies. Where there had been four, we now had eight.

How can it be that these tinier than tiny fish, released from their mama’s belly into an environment approximate to their natural habitat only in that the temperature is kept at a tropical 75 degrees and there are stones below and water all around, swim, fully alive, ignored by their parent yet able to swim and find food and grow?

I imagine these tiny fish in streams in the Dominican Republic, and tiny fish like these in streams all over the world, the life in the water revealed in the tank in our dining room, in the babies who, now bigger, swim over to us with their parents in the evenings, expecting their food.

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