Today the
postman brought
me the macaw
I'd ordered
off the internet.
Caveat emptor—
I got sent a
Scottish crow.

The regular three-monthly reminder

that submissions to Otoliths close in about four weeks. It's shaping up to be another great issue.

don't fret

I write myself notes:

B♭, D, F—

they strike a chord.

another marsupial moment

A tiny — and distinctly dead — endangered marsupial has helped authorities catch an alleged wildlife thief and recover a stolen two-metre python after a remarkable rescue involving police, wildlife officers and the Defence Department.

The drama began when the unfortunate woylie — wearing a wristwatch-sized radio collar — was eaten by a carpet python at a nature reserve south of Perth, known by scientists as a haven for the cute rodent-like critter.

Aware that the snake could die after swallowing the tracking device, wildlife officers took the bulging python to the Department of Environment and Conservation for monitoring. Two days later, the snake was stolen — with the dead woylie and tracking device still inside it.

In a daring response, the department used an aeroplane and a team of angry scientists to track the woylie's radio signal, even getting Defence Department approval to enter restricted air space, before pinpointing it to a house in Heathridge in Perth's northern suburbs. DEC senior scientist Nicky Marlow, who headed a ground crew liaising with the plane, said the data provided was amazingly accurate. "The location they gave us was within 60m of where it was found, which is brilliant. We went out with an omni-directional antenna fitted to our vehicle and just drove past the spot so that we wouldn't arouse suspicion.

"We then called the police and wildlife officers and we all rendezvoused," she said.

"It was really exciting. There were five police, a justice of the peace, two wildlife officers and four of us (from the woylie research program)." Police yesterday charged a 30-year-old Heathridge man with receiving stolen goods.

Investigations are continuing with more charges possible. Dr Marlow said the large carpet python was worth up to $2000 on the legitimate market and much more on the black market. But she said it was a mystery how the thief knew it was at the department. Nothing else was stolen in the burglary.

The Australian


Juvenile woylie (Photo: Sabrina Trocini)
Photo from the Woylie Conservation Research Project website

d   riven

Stone the wallabies!

"Things are really hopping in Tasmania where wallabies are getting stoned on the state's opium poppy crops and creating crop circles.

The wallabies are breaking into the poppy fields and making the circles while they're high.

Rick Rockliff from Tasmanian Alkaloids says wildlife and livestock which eat the poppies are known to act weird, and he's told the Hobart Mercury there's been many stories about sheep eating the poppies and then walking around in circles.

Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market."

The Hobart Mercury



Fair cop. It's a photoshopped poppy crop with a bopper too stoned to hop.

struggggle

which leads me to......

Not really furniture,

more a kind of Attaché Case. Or a Dalek with indigestion.

on Tuesdays,

he always dreamt of
Amelia Earhart.

geographies: São Paulo

The coronal approach
is made behind the
hairline. Tension lines lie
mediolateral from ear to
ear. All the incisions
are placed on fine cracks,
usually run lengthwise
along the skull. There are
no natural landmarks.

What does change

are the morning birds.

Yesterday, five large sulphur-crested cockatoos, raucous, bacchanalian almost, in the crown of a tree on a level with the bedroom window, picking the fruit off with, & holding them in, their claws, then their beaks tearing the flesh away to get at the kernel within. The flesh dropped onto the driveway below, then the woody covering of the nut broken open, also spat away. Finally, the feast, continuing until there were no fruit left within reach.

Today, a single kingfisher on the clothesline, silent, ascetic. Carniverous. Looking for lizards. All the flesh edible.

A young William Carlos Williams

by a young William Carlos Williams.

---

Pictures from Brueghel

Having grown up
with Ginsberg &
Dylan & the other

members of the
50’s, 60’s gang as
loose contemporaries

I find they sit
comfortably within me
but do not talk

to the aging self
I find myself be-
coming. Now it is

Carlos Williams I
seek out to engage
in conversation.

still sitting down....

Not Bette Davis eyes



but Dali's Mae West lips couch in situ.

One of the things

about ongoing projects that acquire some quantity is that you lose track of the starting points. I went looking in my series magritte directory to get the image that I've used in the post below, certain I'd used it as generation because it's one of my favorites. Discovered I hadn't so have rectified the omission, with heavy acknowledgment to the late, great J. G. Ballard, one of whose early short stories was about life lived in reverse.

Perspective: David's Madame Récamier

Assume a life-
line in reverse.

Death comes first.
Before that, head-

stone, interment,
mourning crowd,

laying out, the prep-
aration of the body.

Move forwards.
Miss Marx. Pass

through two
revolutions, a liberal

monarchy, literary
salons. Chateaubriand,

Mme de Staël amongst
the names. Napoleon.

Bring in Ingres, who
uses Magritte's posed

figure as basis for
La Grande Odalisque.

Which influences
David. Who does not

finish his painting
of Madame Récamier.

Was pissed when told
that someone else was

getting the commission.
But starts it anyway.

still on the trail

Mais
où sont
les chaise-longues d'antan?

&, following the furniture trail,

I arrive at one of my favorite pieces by the brilliant Márton Koppány.



Ellipsis No. 5
I have a small signed copy of it on the wall behind me.

A review of terracotta worriers

posted to Goodreads by Grady Harp.

Theater of the Absurd

It takes awhile to get into Mark Young's chapbook TERRACOTTA WORRIERS. The initial page of this handsome download shows the now famous and well regarded image of the buried statues of warriors in China, and unless the reader's eye is acutely tuned to the humor that lies within this collection of poems, the first connection seems to be that the title reads Terracotta Warriors instead of Worriers. That's how keen Young plays with the eye and the sensitivity to humor of the reader.

What follows is a series of thirteen poems that simply play with facts and allusions and in solid format create single page seemingly serious poems that find the central core of humor so often mistaken as contemporary journalism: what appears to be reportage and factual is in fact disjointed nonsense - with a thrust of choreographed genius!

Mark Young is up there with Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein. Download this collection of ingeniously pasted absurdities and enjoy a very bright poet at work!

telepatchy

which, of course, reminds me of this