"water cuddles up like Jello"

Kay Ryan considers a floating needle, Netanyahu visits Congress

May you sleep longer than usual tonight and dream vivid dreams.
May you break through a sad logjam.
May you have a little sweet time on your hands.

Harlech Castle across the Traeth Mawr by John Varley, British (1800–42)

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A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water
(— Ripley’s Believe It or Not)
by Kay Ryan

Who hasn’t seen
a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?
The water cuddles up like Jell-O.
It’s a treat to see water
so rubbery, a needle
so peaceful, the point encased
in the tenderest dimple.
It seems so simple
when things or people
have modified each other’s qualities
somewhat;
we almost forget the oddity
of that.

from The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (New York: Grove Press, 2010).

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Creative Invitation

Juxtaposition is an underrated creative act that happens often in the dreamworld. Surprise!—the broccoli and the doll shoe are roommates. The speeding car and the toilet bowl know each other from high school. Ordinary things can be woken up to emote anew when juxtaposed. Size and proportion become less important.

Last night, I dreamed that I was driving my Matchbox car off a tree branch over a mural of a lake. This week, Benjamin Netanyahu, genocidaire extraordinaire, went to Washington and addressed Congress. The juxtaposition should cause city-wide fires with curses sung by Siouxsie and the Banshees, make the streets run with rivers of red paint.

Sometimes unlikely things are friends; sometimes enemies; sometimes neutral. Today, look for two unlike things which nevertheless might wish to share a cigarette in the rain. Put them together for a spell and see what they say.

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"I think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn't their life and our life. Nor your life and my life.

That it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes."

~Kate Forster

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