October 16, 2012

Now it's beginning to look as much like fall here as it ever does, most of the trees are beginning to turn some shade of brown or yellow.  Scattered leaves are blowing around in the winds this morning.  Over head blue is receding draped in a thin cirrus haze, my favorite gauze curtain look.  Some kind of bright red berry has ripened and is glowing on a vine outside the window, small clusters of impossible red.  The mini-magnolia continues to put out fans of new leaves, lighter green than the older ones with some shades of rust along the edges and close to the start of the leaf.  Only the gray striped cat is out this morning, and very few birds, though I could hear some jays earlier.  They seem to be out most often, though I would say cardinals and mockingbirds are not far behind.  Once in awhile there are sea birds, gulls or terns, the occasional egret or heron, woodpeckers both small and large, somehow unless the tiny wrens and finches come to the water bowl I rarely see them.  Texas just has a LOT of birds most of the year, and I don't think we ever see half of them.

Yesterday there was a news story about how amateur astronomers found a planet orbiting a binary sun, and what was really strange is that two other suns orbit the two suns the planet orbits.  Just when you think things can't get any stranger, something comes along and . . . well, I guess there is never enough strange!  So I found this poem about an unfamiliar outlook, with a "punny title" and thought I would send it because you know the amateurs who found that planet are wondering if it would be like that planet in Star Wars with the binary sun . . . Tatooine.  Seeing our planet from space has change the viewpoint of a lot of people, and not just astronauts.

Mars Poetica    

Imagine you're on Mars, looking at earth,

a swirl of colors in the distance.

Tell us what you miss most, or least.

Let your feelings rise to the surface.

Skim that surface with a tiny net.

Now you're getting the hang of it.

Tell us your story slantwise,

streetwise, in the disguise

of an astronaut in his suit.    

Tell us something we didn't know

before: how words mean things

we didn't know we knew.

Wyn Cooper

I think that must be a common experience among poets and writers and other people who deal with words, as we all do:  they often mean things we didn't know we knew.  That writing sometimes surprises us with something new we didn't know, or something old we just didn't want to acknowledge.  What will the first people who get to Mars think of the Earth, their left-behind home?  Will they be too busy with their life there to give it much thought, will they find that leaving behind a whole planet is sort of like growing up and leaving home, wrenching to begin but soon you get used to it?  I want to say I can't imagine being in that situation, but I can imagine it, just don't know if that imagining would come anywhere close to  the truth of the experience.  You can say that for a lot of things.  Can someone from Pakistan imangine my life, or I theirs?  How about people in Alaska, do they know the heat we have here or can we really imagine an entire white winter?  I am sure alien is a word that simply means not like me, and in that respect there are a lot of aliens here already, yes?