A Gift of Four

Sometimes exhaustion hits me when I least expect it. It's not even 10 PM and I feel like I've been awake for thirty hours, somehow. So, rather than a proper blog, I leave you with a video, a song, a poem, and a recipe.

The video, the latest from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which I am watching right now, which is about chickens. Three days ago I subscribed to the Des Moines Register e-mail update list, and every day, chickens have been in the news. So I guess it's local and pertinent? But seriously, Oliver's doing some pretty amazing advocacy work on topics that don't usually surface in everyday conversation. This time around: Calling out the Congress Appropriations committee to protect chicken farmers' right to speak out against exploitative corporate practices. Because there is no good reason to downvote that, aside from campaign financing grossness.



The song, Fiona Apple's "Hot Knife," which is currently on my car's six-CD playlist. I love belting out when we get to the chorus.

he excites me
must be like the genesis of rhythm
I get feisty
whenever I'm with him




The poem, Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck":

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

And the recipe. from Host the Toast: The Best Chewy Cafe Style Chocolate Chip Cookies. I bake cookies pretty much constantly, but I actually rarely partake myself. (The act of baking is psychological comfort for me, not the consumption of comfort food itself.) These cookies, however, I have eaten three so far. I will probably have more. They are DELICIOUS.