The Immortality of Flies

MAN CURSING THE SEA
—Miroslav Holub

Someone
just climbed to the top of the cliffs
and began to curse the sea.

Dumb water, stupid pregnant water,
slow, slimy copy of the sky,
you peddler between sun and moon,
pettifogging pawnbroker of shells,
soluble, loud-mouthed bull,
fertilizing the rocks with your blood,
suicidal sword
dashed to bits on the headland,
hydra, hydrolizing the night,
breathing salty clouds of silence,
spreading jelly wings
in vain, in vain,
gorgon, devouring its own body,

water, you absurd flat skull of water—

And so he cursed the sea for a spell,
it licked his footprints in the sand
like a wounded dog.

And then he came down
and patted
the tiny immense stormy mirror of the sea.

There you go, water, he said,
and went his way.

________________________

Don't let the rain scare you away from the SNAKE PARTY tomorrow night (Wednesday, 4/12). Come hear the Straight Out Scribes in their LAST PERFORMANCE IN SACRAMENTO before Staajabu moves to New Jersey, then take home a free littlesnake broadside from each of them. We'll be at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sac., 7:30 pm. A read-around will follow; bring your own poetry or somebody else's.

Looking for a workshop, for a chance to do a little spring cleaning of your writing skills? Rae Gouirand, the new Writer-in-Residence at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve writes: I'm now enrolling the second eight-week workshop I'll be leading this spring out at Cache Creek Nature Preserve: "Poetry and the Powers of Ten," a workshop that will start off exploring the issues raised in the Morrison/Eames pictorial classic "Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe" and then take up questions about how we deal with issues of perspective, vision/image, microscoping and telescoping, abstraction, presence/embodiment, and comprehension in poetry/as poets. As per usual, I use the terms 'poetry' and 'poet' loosely, and leave lots of room here for people who are both reverent and resistant when it comes to poetry, the cosmos, atomistic science, tooling with visual aids, or the very notion of calculable math itself. All that's required is interest and commitment to be there as a member of the group and as a creative participant in the landscape of the Preserve, which has proved a tremendous site resource for area writers since the advent of the Writer-in-Residence program. You should be comfortable working outside and spending part of every meeting working independently. The focus of the Preserve workshops is on genesis rather than on formal critique. The workshop will run on Thursdays from 10 AM-noon, April 20 through June 8. Thereafter I'll be running a shorter poetry intensive in the same time slot before we break for the summer. The workshop is offered free of charge to the public, with thanks to the Teichert Foundation and the Preserve for their support. Cache Creek Nature Preserve is not far from downtown Woodland, and directions are available from a number of sources, including me. If you'd like to enroll, please email me directly (rae_gouirand@yahoo.com) with your name, email address, and a phone number where I could reach you in the event of cancellation or some such. Don't be shy if you haven't joined us before—we're wide open to new participants. And please feel free to forward this message along to anyone you know who just might be looking for us, too. JoAnn Anglin adds, Rae has taken the place of Andrea Ross, who moved with her family to Philadelphia. This time won’t work for many, but for those who can make it, they will find this a wonderful setting for writing. The website for the preserve is: http://www.cachecreekconservancy.org. [Medusa adds: See Rattlesnake Review #4 for JoAnn's article about the Cache Creek workshop, and #5 for samples of their writing.]

It's also time for the Internet April Boot Camp with Molly Fisk, if you're of a mind to write fast and hard for a week. She writes: Camp begins on Sunday, April 23, and ends Friday, April 28. If you'd like a description of Boot Camp and all the dates for 2006, check the site at: http://www.poetrybootcamp.com… In other news: after 3 years, I am raising my prices. As of May 1st, the fee for Boot Camp will be $175. I know price increases are sometimes a bummer, so I'd like to sweeten the deal: if you sign up for, and pay for, any 2006 camp before that date, you can have the old rate of $150.

Molly Fisk is also thinking of spearheading a workshop in August near Boulder. Contact her at the bookcamp website if you're interesting in seeing what she wants to do.

________________________

Remember when I was collecting fly poems?

THE FLY
—Miroslav Holub

She sat on the willow bark
watching
part of the battle of Crecy,
the shrieks,
the moans,
the wails,
the trampling and tumbling.

During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
sitting on a disemboweled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

Relieved she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled
and the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and just
a few arms and legs
twitched under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armorer.

And so it came to pass—
she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estres.

(Today's poems were translated from the Czech by Stuart Friebert and Dana Habova.)

_______________________

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)