Crow followed Ulysses till he turned
As a worm, which Crow ate.

Grappling with Hercules’ two puff-adders
He strangled in error Dejanira.

The gold melted out of Hercules’ ashes
Is an electrode in Crow’s brain.

Drinking Beowulf’s blood, and wrapped in his hide,
Crow communes with poltergeists out of old ponds.

His wings are the stiff back of his only book,
Himself the only page — of solid ink.

So he gazes into the quag of the past
Like a gypsy into the crystal of the future,

Like a leopard into a fat land.

~ Crowego, from Ted Hughes’ Crow

Crow thought of a palace –
Its lintel crashed on him, his bones were found.

Crow thought of a fast car –
It plucked his spine out, and left him empty and armless.

Crow thought of the wind’s freedom –
And his eyes evaporated, the wind whistled over the Turkish Saddle.

Crow thought of a wage –
And it choked him, it was cut unspoiled from his dead stomach.

Crow thought of the soft and warm that is long remembered –
It blindfolded him with silk, it gangplanked him into a volcano.

Crow thought of intelligence –
It turned the key against him and he tore at its fruitless bars.

Crow thought of nature’s stupor –
And an oak tree grew out of his ear.

A row of his black children sat in the top.
They flew off.

Crow
Never again moved.

~ Magical Dangers, from Ted Hughes’ Crow

Yes, that’s one big ol’ honkin’ lotus bud. Very springish, I thought.

In veneration of the vernal, I’ve recently added a nifty moon phase widget under the calendar on the sidebar, and I’ve updated the security on the site — mainly for my own sanity, since Spring seems to be the Season of All-Things-Spamtastic. If you, dear reader, happen to experience an inability to post comments, then mayhaps you are really a bot in denial. I’m just sayin’.

I’m also showing a collection of new works [I'll be hanging them today at the Fairmount] for the annual Fort Worth Spring Arts Goggle. The Bud-of-Doom will be there. You should be too. Details listed below.

Fort Worth Arts Goggle – Friday, March 27th
The Fairmount
600 W. Magnolia Ave
Fort Worth, TX 76104
817.420.9455

Yes, I’ll be there. ^This brooding chick will be too.

Today’s dawn pictured above. Things are getting breezy as of this afternoon [pictured below], but nothing too crazy yet. The sky was sunny and clear for most of the morning, however things have started to cloud over now. Suprisingly, there’s been very little rain so far — I suspect that’ll change though. And soon.

I’ll edit this entry when I’ve got some pictures of stuff really blowin’ around.

Friday 7:50pm edit: Ike has produced some glorious evening skies:

Saturday 8:30am edit: Finally the flickering power has settled enough for an entry. It seems we’re some of the lucky few to have it — over 2.5 million do not at the moment. Ike really got rolling here around 3am, and I attempted some long exposure shots in the dark, hoping to catch the whipping trees and rain. Between transformers blowing, flashes of lightning, and the sulphurous glow of the then-remaining streetlamps, the image is eerie.

The last of the eyewall eventually came sluggishly screaming past shortly after sunrise. One hundred mile per hour wind gusts made outdoor photography unwise, but I did risk a bit by pressing myself to a rattling upper storey window for a shot of the outside world. I would’ve tried for a more dramatic shot, since this one doesn’t really capture the awesome sideways-ness of the trees [being between gusts it seems], but an ominous cracking sound prompted me to rethink the merits of being downstairs.

Saturday 10:26am edit — Well for me it’s a harsh loss, but it certainly pales in comparison to some — my laptop is apparently dead. For now, I’m left working on mom’s dinosaur of a machine. It’s not optimal, but it’ll do.

Saturday 10:05pm edit: Through determined fussing with the computer, and with an epiphany brought on by a rejuvenating catnap, I managed to bring the laptop back to life by ripping the battery out of the back of it and blistering it with a creative string of profanity. I highly recommend this procedure for all recalcitrant bits of technology. That being said, I’m awfully tired after some intensive post-Ike cleaning up. I didn’t have much time to snap new shots of the destruction, and even if I had, the atmosphere was so sodden I would’ve probably had to’ve resorted to blistering the camera with profanity to bring it back to life.

And now I’m off to sleep in the silence, which seems so strange.

So I decided to go poke Ike in the eye. Luckily enough, Mom lives in prime storm country.

The drive down was adventuresome — people were palpably frantic, and even normally quiet backroads were jammed with the desperate. Cattle trucks, hay haulers, and minivans stuffed to the gills with supplies were commonplace. Driver courtesy, however, was not.

I plan to document as much of the hurricane as possible, and although my blog might not have up-to-the-minute coverage of the events, I hope that I at least get some interesting shots to post later. I spent yesterday snapping photos of anything I could think of; merely to have a frame of reference for “before and after” shots of possible havoc wreaking.

Mom’s lush array of fragile, tropical flowers seemed likely candidates for immediate annihilation by Ike’s winds, so I snapped a few shots of the “floral chorus”.

Of course, a stormy-ish sky shot:

Things should get *really* interesting by this afternoon.

More from me later — it’s time to batten down the hatches!

Just as the grumpy fellows above are pictured removing unsavory items from their domain, so too do I vigorously expunge spam from this site on an almost daily basis. However, this morning’s bleary-eyed perusal confounded my non-caffeinated brain: the spam scanned as poetry to me.

Obviously not a true sonnet, but still. Enjoy.

undistinguishableness hydroaromatic rewash tablespoon sentience conusable unmodifiableness heptadecyl

snoek preludious remarker unteamed anecdotal gemsbuck decisive myristate

trouserian peristrumous yamassee unwiliness undebatable panhyperemia morgenstern dryopteris

mock guerickian taphouse hunchy saple forestarling specularly axine

suaharo ohio thunderlike hyperpiesia gentlemanlike enterocystoma frontogenesis saucedish

Note: My thanks to my photographic cohort and his wife for allowing me to traipse all over their property on this, and several other occasions.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

~ Joseph Addison [1672-1719]

And of course, a little something from Shakespeare:

So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.

~ From A Midsummer’s Night Dream, [III. ii. 208]

The usual suspects.