We've Turned the Corner Now

I wake in the night having dreams of words. When I get up they fall on to the sheet, slide to the floor, and pass through the pine boards. They were something like, but much better than, these:

Walk outdoors. 

Listen

and watch for bulbs and seeds cracking, 

for banners on green poles rushing 

toward sky and sun. 

Breathe

and taste lilac, poppies, asparagus.

Emerge from winter squinting

and sniffing the air.

RECIPES from Aunt Elsie

In 1887 Miss Elsie Busjahn was born. Sister to Frank Busjahn, my husband’s grandfather, she became Winslow, Illinois’ telephone operator. Over the years the stories of her white fudge and the enormous size of the pieces she cut, have made my mouth water. Over the years I have talked with my mother-in-law about her and her famous baking, cooking, and canning. Her green steel recipe file painted with black Wiener Werkstatte graphics and lettering, is now my treasure. Thank you, Mom.

Filed under:

Dried Meats

Mrs Greenfield’s Dried Beef

Salt brine strong enough

to hold an egg.

Leave in this two weeks.

Hang up

and smoke a little.

An Uncommon Dream

I dreamed an uncommon dream last night. I held a newborn baby close to my chest. He was wrapped in a blanket with only his face and tufted head visible. His toddler-sister sat beside me patting his head, her face and lips quivering in joy. A dream, short and straightforward, of such clarity that I woke wondering; why this? And then I remembered—the article I read yesterday—a clinic in the city of brotherly love busted by the FBI and DEA. Beyond the pre-signed prescription pads, the illegal delivery of oxycontin and other pain-killers; the law enforcement officers found revulsion beyond any they had ever encountered—women in varying states of consciousness and childbirth, wee feet in jars, infant bodies in refrigerators, freezers, and garbage bags, and blood, so much blood. I don’t want to look, no, no, but I feel I ought, and I do. Human flesh born alive and cut into with scissors in the hand of a doctor or his untrained assistants—they called it ensuring fetal demise—cutting into the neck and snipping the babys’ spinal columns.

The Grand Jury Report provides battering rams for both sides of this issue. But, please, please, in this one moment, let us lay down the weaponry and step aside from the ammunition, close our eyes and remember the dream; remember the last time you touched or held a baby newly born, scented yet of that other world. Hold this love and wonder in one hand, and with the other turn the pages as you read the Overview of the Grand Jury Report, First Judicial District of Pennsylvania. And if you want to look, and I really don’t want to encourage you, but if you feel you must, if you feel you ought, you may proceed beyond the Overview to the images—to have your eyes opened. Here is the link: www.lifeissues.org                      

January Acedia, Or Why All the Remainder

pencils from my three children’s thirteen years each of school that were left in desk drawers and book bags are sharpened, but touch no paper save the squares of crossword puzzles; why pens are poised useless in cups with ink steadily drying; why my arms, my wrists, my hands and fingers grind and make coffee, carry laundry and shovel snow, open my laptop and slide the mouse over to Facebook, the BBC, or your blog, but cannot open Microsoft Word or the cover of a black moleskin.

Remember Daniel

   They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever & ever. . . . go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest . . . Daniel 12: 3 & 13
   
dear friends and family, Christmas 2010:

on the lip of the river
see Daniel,
palms redolent of lion,
the King's seer
puzzling disaster.
A figure something like a man,
clad in linen and light,
opens his mouth.
A galaxy of voices roars
planting and harvesting of nations,
whirlwind and horsemen and ships,
trouble
that stretches beyond all squinting eyes.
Daniel marks the answer to how long--
a time, times, and a half--
then closes up the book,
sealed to the time of the end.

This single instance Daniel cannot see
beyond the bronze man straddling the river.
He speaks our sightless hearts' words,
I don't understand.

The answer is 
secret, all sealed shut.
But the answer is also
go on your way;
guide toward the right path;
look forward
to bright shining.

PS to Nobel Prize in Chemistry

One of the aforementioned prize-winning chemists has been messing around with palladium’s catalytic properties since the 1960’s. Back then he used palladium to more quickly link a ring of carbon atoms to a short piece of carbon to produce styrene. You know, styrene, polystyrene, plastic—the messianic material of our generation? Remember sitting around the campfire drinking cocoa, then tossing those Styrofoam cups into the fire? Their shriveling hypnotized us as they melted in the embers. The vaporous stench watered our eyes and singed our lungs.

So, we manufacture the little sponge’s enemy-killer, to fend off the stalker that seeks us as we play and breathe, as we consume our daily minimums in the 2000’s.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry, October 2010

Palladium-catalyzed cross-couplings in organic synthesis

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. It was awarded for the discovery of the above-noted process which allows a substance found in nature to be easily and quickly made in the lab. The compound, discodermolide, is produced by a sponge, a creature at the simplest end of the Animal Kingdom. Sponges are of the phylum Porifera, which describes their biology aptly—they have no circulatory or digestive systems and survive by absorbing nutrients and oxygen as water rushes through their porous bodies. The sponge of interest, Discodermia dissoluta, inhabits the Caribbean waters and links together carbon molecules in a way to make this discodermolide which happens to poison its predators.

As I listen to the report, I imagine there was a rush to analyze discodermolide to see if it might mortify any of our major enemies, perhaps cancer? The compound does have anti-cancer properties, but the harvesting of enough dissoluta for widespread chemotherapy would be difficult, if not impossible, while giving it top billing on the endangered species list. The chemists hit their labs and set about synthesizing the compound. They were successful. Three Homo sapiens were awarded the prize for their method which allows discodermolide to be made more quickly and easily using palladium to speed up the carbon bonding process.

I am grateful for the creativity and persistence of these researchers as my dad sits in the oncology treatment room every Thursday this month with the cancer poisons flowing into one of his left arm veins. The radio commentator concludes:

You know, nature has figured out a lot of really remarkable reactions. And the trick, as you say, is to put them into some kind of format where you can use them in a commercial process and make enough of it to use.

We have the trick down. Dedicated and stubborn men and women racked their brains, spent years under the fluorescents in the organic lab, and found the format to create the commercial process for the manufacture of these compounds. Like these dogged scientists, did nature figure out the initial process that enabled a sponge to form a complex enemy-repelling poison? Does nature possess that kind of intellectual capacity and imagination? Isn’t there perhaps One who exceeds our organic chemists in creativity and intellect, who crafted the poison-producing sponges of the Caribbean as well as the Nobel-winning scientists; the One not far from each of us, in whom we live, and move, and are?