Ode to the Rough-plated Songbirds
I swear
if I scratch
it it
will make a
sound.
cheecheecheepcheechee
After a record
player, fingernail
a needle
catch an objects’ true
name along
the dust and the
groove.
—
A catfish has no
scales, adorned
with only taste buds
on its slithering filth.
Imagine! The awful,
awe-filled sensation
of a sense on the fritz.
D has started taking a writing class and we’ve been playing around with some of the prompts. The first one was ekphrasis which is: “the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.” So I wrote about these cool plates we got in Alaska - a friend of a friend’s artwork. They’re super ridgy - very tactile.
Umwelt is maybe my favorite new word of 2022/23. It’s a German word that means environment but more philosophically means the way something perceives the world being the self that it is, having the biology and anatomy that it has. (i.e. a tick has core desires and functions that vary dramatically from a humans and therefore probably wouldn’t acknowledge a cold loaf of bread.)
I’m reading An Immense World by Ed Yong which talks a lot about umwelt and also dropped the catfish taste buds bomb… crazy! The sensory overload we would have if we had many of the incredible functionalities of animals…
Thanks, as always for reading.
Know someone who may get a kick out of some musings, poetry and songs? It would be awesome if you’d share this with them!