I’ve accepted a new position of responsibility, though since the negotiations with my wife took 25 hours, we’re currently not so sure about whether we want promotions in the future. Our new team member is Joseph Andreas, and here’s a picture of him in the arms of Andreas.
I was quite convinced we’d hire a girl, but I think he’ll do his job just fine. The doc came by our house last night and concurred with the midwife that he’s a healthy little guy with no signs of trouble. What a miracle!
Let’s face it, pressure ruins poetry. Poetry needs time to take form, a bit like it takes time for crude oil to form from fossil trees. It looks to me like the closer I write to the Phi Kappa Phi deadline, the worse the poem. This issue’s winner, who wrote a slightly modified Villanelle on the topic of recovery and used the form and meter to good effect certainly deserved to win more than I did. I doubt my submission on the topic of “Scare Tactics” will do any better, written as it was the day of the deadline…
But when has mediocrity kept a blogger from publishing? Here’s my poem on recovery – yep, an absence of rhymes is a pretty good indicator I didn’t spend enough time on the poem.
The Next Dive
I fall, stiff with disbelief,
toward what looks like
– when I can see it –
a gun-metal whipped-cream froth
that hurtles closer, closer
despite my wishing it away
The cold slap of water
against my fingerbrowtorso
strips me of illusions
robs me of breath
to force my focus upward
for pain can wait
I pierce the waves
and fresh air fills my lungs
and old doubts fill my mind
with every stroke of tingling arm
the shore draws closer, closer
but only the shore
My hands grab rock and shrub
and grope around for more
my heart beats in my throat
straining ahead of my body
to climb back up so he can
push me off again
Janet’s looking as good as always, just feeling a little more tired than normal. That didn’t keep her from planting a miniature herb garden outside our window, so here’s a photo with our most promising growth projects.
We are hoping that baby stays inside a little longer, but in two days Little One will officially cross the line from preemie to regular, which I think makes it time to open the baby pool. You can participate by commenting with your prediction of birth date, size, weight, and gender of Little One. Whoever gets closest to the truth will be crowned the grand winner and will receive an as of yet undecided prize.
Rules for determining the grand winner:
1. If you get the gender right, you receive 0 points; if you get it wrong, -10 points.
2. For every day you are off, -1 point.
3. For every centimeter you are off, -1 point.
4. For every 200 grams you are off, -1 point.
5. The person with the highest total wins.
Go to digitaldutch for a useful unit conversion link!
At the Nanotech Day of Northwestern Switzerland on May 11th we had a booth, and so did Martin Oeggerli, who has made a career of taking extremely sharp electron microscope images and coloring them. I like his work and invite you to have a look at his website, www.micronaut.ch.