By Olivia Scheck

Last week, while vacationing in San Francisco, I was introduced to a new and thoroughly modern form of evening entertainment. Instead of buying tickets to a concert, “getting sloshed” or simply enjoying each other's company, my hosts and I gathered around a computer to video chat with strangers.

Using a website called Chatroulette, we connected instantly to female college students in Korea, teenage boys in Brazil and one gentleman dressed as a horse. For the first few minutes of our exchange, the equine man danced before his webcam. Afterwards, he took off his mask, and we had a surprisingly intimate discussion about his life in a quiet Massachusetts town where he wished he had more friends.

Websites connecting strangers for aimless chatter are nearly as old as the internet itself. AOL chat rooms, which still provide a meeting place for groups to chat about American Idol and True Love After 40, reached their height of popularity in the late 90's. More recently, a teenage web programmer developed a website called Omegle to connect strangers in one-on-one interactions. Unlike traditional chat rooms, Omegle pairs users randomly and gives them no information about the people with whom they are chatting. (Instead of usernames, participants appear as “you” and “me.”) Either party can disconnect and begin chatting with someone new at any time.

Chatroulette, which employs the same format plus live audio and video, is the natural follow-up to Omegle, however the user experience is considerably more bizarre. With each connection, you are transported to someone's living room, bedroom or office cubicle. Unlike traditional text chat, the video feature provides much of the information (e.g. physical appearance, voice and mannerisms) that you use to read people in daily life. And the tendency towards prevarication that has historically marred internet meeting places is mitigated. You can't claim to be a 14-year-old girl if you're a middle-aged man, but you can still deny being middle aged.

In other words, Chatroulette is eerily similar to the real world.

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This Christmas season I totally shocked my friends and family in a way that I probably haven’t managed to since I announced I was moving in with a man I had known for a few weeks (I married him in the end.) Seemingly, I reversed myself on a topic on which everyone, myself included until recently, thought I was resolute. My husband still hasn’t quite forgiven me for my change of course and was totally unmoved by my rationale. I bought my daughters a Wii for Christmas. For many years they have bemoaned the fact that, apparently, they are “the only children that don’t have a Wii or a DS.” Actually, I think that may actually be true, at least if our family, friends, extended family and acquaintances are anything to go by. My original feelings on the subject, which do still hold fast for the DS and many other video gaming systems, is that children spend far too much time on these things, to the detriment of imaginative play, outdoor play and reading. I hate nothing more than seeing children who can’t seem to go for an hour at a time without playing on a device, sitting at the dinner table disengaged from the conversations around them, not able to find any other way to amuse themselves whether they’re alone or with friends. My children expended quite a bit of debating energy trying to persuade me that the Wii is different; it involves physical participation, it’s a more social gaming system, and based on some research and informal polling on my Facebook page, I came to the conclusion that they did have a point. But ultimately, this wasn’t really what finally pushed me over the Amazon edge to the purchase of a Wii console and assorted games. What really caused me to rethink my previously intransigent position on gaming devices were the articles and books I’ve read recently, in the course of my innovation-related reading, about the educational virtues of gaming and most especially, the place of fun in learning.

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“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
………………………………………… –Bob Dylan

Eclipse

at a wall on a corner of the world
I’m still waiting for Godot as mullahs
and priests go by in the robes
of their pride incensing and
murmuring. I’m thinking
burn-poles and bombs and wonder
how many gods must there be
in the world before too many
people have died

down the ages they come and go
hot and promising as new stars
then collapse and freeze
unyielding and grasping
as black holes

the latest on the block,
intent upon eclipsing Christ
who subsumed Yahweh
who buried a pantheon of Ba’als
who defeated the sea god Yam
who rose fresh and dripping
from fathoms of the unfathomed
is on the tragic course
of those before who
by fatwa or inquisition
by crusade, by imposition
with unwarranted holy assurance
and a fire-in-the-belly mission
marked their highways to heaven
in blood

isn’t it good for the world
that this one’s not triune
since one god over-reaching
is all it takes to leave
a million mothers weeping
…………………..
it takes just one
with a new moon of magic
to eclipse the light of earth
with a teaching

by Jim Culleny;
Jan 13, 2009

This is your very breakable brain on NFL Sunday.

I opened an otherwise innocuous copy of a magazine the other day, and my shoulders leapt up in a shudder. Couldn’t help it. I was being confronted by the snout of a tiger snake, a closeup snapped from a low angle, so that a good third of the son of a bitch’s body seemed to be hovering off the ground—coiled, tense, about to strike. I have no idea if tiger snakes are poisonous, but that didn’t matter: before my conscious brain could react the fear had already shivered outward from somewhere in my own reptile brain. The same thing happens if I dream about sitting in a tall swaying tree or imagine cleaning windows on a skyscraper. Brrr. Obviously I’m in no danger from a picture or fantasy, but again, the frisson is a reflex, uncontrolled behavior when I glimpse something potentially perilous.

Shudders like that don’t have to be inborn instinct, either; they can be the result of conditioning, too, something learned over time from the coupling of vivid images and nauseous stimuli. All of which is to say that I’m starting to feel the same snaky shivers, subtle but growing, each time I sit down to watch football nowadays. Not quite to the point of having to look away yet, but I’m always slightly relieved when someone just runs out of bounds, and I don’t chuckle anymore when the body count gets too high on gang tackles. The worst are kickoffs and punts, when bodies hurtle in from crazy angles, whipping around like bats. I feel the snags because with every hit I can imagine—sometimes practically hear—the splat of the players’ brains inside their helmets.

Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.

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by Evert Cilliers

Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note.

To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for when I'm gobsmacked by the exceptionalism of our incompetent institutions, like the Fed missing the bubble, our intelligence services not nixing the visa of the Explosive Gonads Bomber, our incompetent pols giving an incompetent Wall Street the right to ruin us again in a few years, the Senate letting Joe Liebermann take one last bite out of the healthcare bill, or the CIA putting out the welcome mat for a triple agent who's about to blow them up. And then there's Obama asking ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to help Haiti, when Bush destroyed Haiti's democracy in 2004 and Clinton's been trying to turn the country into a sweatshop.

I've got this default setting that stops me from foaming at the mouth in Sartrean nausea and grinding my teeth into Heideggerian nothingness. Here's what I do: I sit myself down and zen in on how much I still love our failed state of America, and how there are things about America that are actually exceptional.

Freedom of speech. MLK. Geeks. The internet (invented by the Pentagon). Entrepreneurs. Paul Krugman. Elizabeth Warren. Steve Jobs. Our generosity to disaster victims. 24/7 innovation. Matt Taibbi. John Cassavetes.The Great Gatsby. Flash drives. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. A can-do attitude that once landed us on the moon.Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan, still doing it.A Streetcar Named Desire.The Decemberists. Warren Buffett.My Fair Lady.New York women who don't take crap from men like women do in other countries yet give better blowjobs than women in other countries. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Meditating on these things of wonder and beauty helps. Especially these days.

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Due to Christmas gallery closures, time away over New Year in Jersey in the Channel Islands, and terrible snow and ice that has made it difficult to get around, I shall not, this week, be posting an art review but three poems written in Kerry, on the west coast of Ireland, from my forthcoming suite 'The Idea of Islands'.This will be published later in the spring by Occasional Press with drawings by the Irish artist Donald Tesky.

Ballinskelligs

They come to me in dreams
Scariff and Deenish, rising like those islands
floating in a veil of mist in Japanese prints,
their peaks in a halo of cloud.
Early morning the sun casts
rings of bright water, stepping stones of light
out to the distant shore. Midnight
and the islands are sleeping, turned in
on their own emptiness as if remembering
those ghostly lives gleaned on the barren cliffs
stinking of sea birds and herring,
the air thick with turf smoke and old rain.
Now they’ve gone the islands lie empty
as picked crab shells, the battering sea lashing
their glassy rocks with the spittle of lost tongues.
Outside my window the strait is moon-streaked,
silver as a hairline crack across
an old mirror. It’s as if I could simply rise
from this bed and walk to that distant shore.
Yet the night holds its secrets.
To feel this flat blackness, where even
the stars are hidden, is to understand what
we cannot see at the edge of the visible world.
The single blip of the lighthouse appears
then disappears every fifteen seconds,
its pulsing beam tracing an arc
across the endless sky, a blinking Cyclops
in the inky dark, till suddenly its morning
and the sun comes up;
streaks of blood-red leaching into the grey.

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To Question a Corpse

I cannot call a poem, it calls me
It comes, I never go to it
.

Some days working alone
one will muscle in and say
let’s scope this out
—it’ll pry at essentials and tug
lifting the lid on the casket of the past
to question a corpse
.

think happenstance—
a thing coincidentally side-lit
glancing off bone, or the sound of a song
falling from a window to the street
as I walk by

.

a brush with a miracle might do
and a poem will come, as when alyssum
looks so perfect in July

.

there’s no such thing as inspiration
other than that I inhale whatever comes
and exhale the words a poem discards
as it vanishes in a clear sky

by Jim Culleny, 1/1/10

by Colin Marshall

Silent Light's opening shot, a gradual four-and-a-half-minute predawn push across a bucolic field as the sun inches over the horizon, signals everything about the sensibility and aesthetic to come. It's a cautious yet intimate venture into several different levels of foreignness at once, reverently observational and hyper-aware of the wealth of detail that surrounds it. Here, I suddenly and gratefully recognized upon first viewing, is a film that's not going to mess around with the usual cinematic shorthand of visual, sonic and narrative cliché.

Given that, perhaps “first experience” should replace “opening shot.” Carlos Reygadas demonstrates beyond all doubt that he both understands and readily wields cinema's potential to happen to its audience, rather than merely to throw up sound-and-light summaries of one damn thing after another. Many directors have worked for twenty, thirty, forty years — often prolifically and lucratively — and still failed to grasp this range of their medium's capabilities. But a film like this makes up for several hundred of those content to be their own Cliffs Notes.

Its simple story centers on a romantic dilemma endured by Johan Voth, a middle-aged Mennonite farmer embedded in his remote northern Mexico community. After having fathered a lookalike brood and ostensibly settled down with the unthrilling but loyal and patent Esther, he's discovered the fascinatingly distant, exotically angular Marianne. One of Johan's confidants calls her his “natural woman,” and he grows more and more inclined to agree. Meeting Marianne for assignations on isolated hills or above her restaurant, Johan comes to believe he's hitched himself to the wrong woman. But how on Earth, so deep in such a cloistered, frowning milieu, to right his mistake?
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By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

*

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

*

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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Justin E. H. Smith

“We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, “Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!”)

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

“I hate guitars,” he would often announce. “I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing.” The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. “The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana,” Boone once said to me. “They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates.” Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. “Yes I suppose.”

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious “yes, I suppose,” instead of a thoughtless “yeah, I guess,” the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

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by Shiban Ganju

I wish you all a happy new year and hope it starts on a lighter note; mine did.

After a year of worrying about the health reform – that wasn’t, and economic meltdown – that was, a phone call from brother in law (BIL) made me ruminate about sexually dysfunctional people. They are of two types: overachievers and underachievers. The news of our latest overachiever, Tiger Woods had caused considerable jealousy and anguish to BIL. Reason: Tiger ‘wood’ and BIL wouldn’t. Years at the hedge fund desk had sapped his libido into ‘libidon’t’.

I would not have found out about BIL’s problem, had he not fainted and fallen flat on his face. He phoned to tell me that he felt dizzy often and had fainted thrice. I was aware, that years of two-Marlboro-packs-a-day had smoke- grilled the arteries of his heart and legs into spastic narrow channels and now he had to take nitrate pills to relax them. Drugged vessels would dilate and ease the blood flow. But with drugs, bad always accompanies good. As a side effect – especially, if he stood up suddenly –his legs would accumulate all the blood gushing down with gravity; his blood pressure would drop and his blood- less head would swirl. Fainting spells pointed to excessive fall of blood pressure, which would spin him out of his senses.

Just to pick on him, I asked, “What other medicine are you on? Are you taking Cialis?”

“No, I am not.”

“Then it must be Levitra or Viagra.”

“How do you know?” he was surprised. The fact is, I didn’t know – until then.

“BIL, doubling your vessel dilators is a no-no.”

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“Abraham said to his father and his people: 'What are these images to whose worship you cleave?'
They said: 'We found our fathers worshipping them.' He said: 'Certainly you have been, you and
your fathers, in manifest error.'”
— Koran, Chapter 21, verses 52-54

The Tughra

Loophole

Warnings in the Hadith
to make no image of God
or man or animal
are no match for the loophole
function of the human mind
which will overcome obstacles
like certainty
and threats of hellfire
to make real any
object of longing
mystic or material
as can easily be seen
in the lovely lyrical
portrait, the Tughra
(signature of Sulaiman
the Magnificent),
disguised as calligraphy,
a loophole allowed in
Muhammed’s line by men
who knew the futility of
banning beauty

by Jim Culleny,
January 2, 2009

By Aditya Dev Sood

She begins with the soles of my feet, tracing out nodes and ridges into which all my wanderings in the world are graven. She is a rehabilitating prisoner at the Chiang Mai Women’s Correctional Facility, halfway out of the system, learning massage as a trade that may keep her out of trouble once she’s released. The massage parlour is a long shed of a room, grimly institutional, the green-blue sheets on the mattresses on the floor match the uniforms the masseuses are wearing. Her touch is light, I close my eyes, the memories and impressions she is unleashing are vivid, the idea of this piece has already taken form.

To be massaged by the opposite gender is a pleasure no longer available in India. Islamic social norms, the demise of courtly and courtesanal culture, Victorian prudence, and Gandhian puritanism have all surely conspired to ensure that when a man and woman are on a mattress together, it must be a flagrant scandal. But varieties of massage survive across East and South-East Asia, as techniques of wellness propagated in Buddhist monasteries, and now more widely available in more and less commercialized spas and treatment centers. The massage services offered by the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison may be a novelty, but they also demonstrate how widely and well established is the practice of massage in the culture and institutions of Thailand.

Mister, you lay down now, she said, without introducing herself. She is small and round, and reminds me of Lotta from the comic strip. I am wearing a kind of Karate outfit of cotton pyjama and jacket with two tie-strips, which I was given to wear before entering the massage hall. Here, six or eight mattresses sit on the floor, backpackers and travelers, all of us, laying upon them. They are melting away under Lotta’s hands, I am only dimly aware, my selfhood dissolving into pure patience, a knower only of pleasure.

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Psychological Science: Measurement, Uncertainty, and Determinism – Part 2

by Norman Costa

Part 1 of this article can be found HERE.

Other articles in Norman Costa's 'Psychological Science' series can be found HERE.

The [Sad] Story So Far

Few ideas are as fundamental to psychological science, and all science, as the concept of measurement. Science does not exist without measurement. Yet, many psychologists who would identify themselves as scientists do not seem to understand the most fundamental definition of measurement: Measurement is a comparison to a standard. This does not speak well for those who are responsible for scientists-in-the-making at the undergraduate level and especially at the graduate level.

Standards of measurement are inventions of the human mind, they are arbitrary, and they require only consensus and demonstrated utility. Over time, standards are improved, changed, or even discarded. For example, standards of measuring time have evolved from naturalistic observation of the cycles of day and night, to using the oscillating properties of the cesium atom. Standards for measuring psychological depression have evolved from vague and general descriptions to a tallying of specific behaviors that can be observed.

Science is an approach to understanding nature and ourselves that has method and content. Science as method is the systematic observation of phenomena and the recording of data. Without measurement, there is no recording of data from observation. Measuring, comparing to a standard, takes place on many levels from the most simple to the very complex. The most basic comparison to a standard is determining that a phenomenon is present or not present. Other comparisons allow us to determine similarity or dissimilarity. If a decision is made that something is dissimilar to a standard, then we might determine how dissimilar, and in what direction, like more or less. Science as content is the organization of this information into a body of knowledge. For example, we have the science of metallurgy, the science of biology, and the science of verbal learning.

So where is this academic exercise leading us? I thought you would never ask. It is leading us to the next important topic associated with measurement: Error, more specifically, errors of measurement. One of the biggest mistakes that scientific psychology makes, however, is confusing the notion of errors of measurement with Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle.' Do you want to know why physicists laugh themselves silly when psychology presents itself as a science? Do you want to know why many scientists in other fields regard scientific psychology as an oxymoron? Please read on.

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by Daniel Rourke

“The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world… It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tale. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world.”

Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Take 12 images and splice them end to end: a shaded length of acetate through which a bright white light is to be shone. This makes one second of film. The reel spools onwards, as the seconds tick by, and from these independent images (isolations of time separated in space) an illusion of coherence emerges.

During a recent flurry of internet activity I stumbled across the work of Takeshi Murata. His videos, having made their way, legitimately or otherwise, into the mysterious Realm of YouTube, have achieved something of a cult status. Among various digital editing techniques Murata is one of the most famous purveyors of the 'Datamoshed' video. A sub-genre of 'glitch-art', datamoshing at first appears to be a mode of expression fine-tuned for the computer geek: a harmless bit of technical fun with no artistic future. But as I watched Murata's videos, from Monster Movie (2005), through to Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007) I became more and more convinced that datamoshing has something profound to say about the status of the image in modern society. Furthermore, and at the risk of sounding Utopian, datamoshing might just be to film what photography was to painting.

Take a human subject. Any will do. Have them sit several metres from your projection, making sure to note that their visual apparatus is pointing towards, and not away from, the resulting cacophony of images. There is no need to alert the subject to your film. Humans, like most animals, have a highly adapted awareness of movement. Your illusion cannot help but catch their attention. As soon as the reel begins to roll they will be hooked.

Cinema is all pervasive. Not just because we all watch (and love) movies, nor that the narratives emerging from cinema directly structure our modern mythos. Rather it is through the language of cinema, whether we are sat in front of a screen or not, that much of the past hundred years of cultural change, of technological and political upheaval can be understood. For Walter Benjamin, whose writings on media appeared almost as regularly as the images flashed by a movie projector, the technology of film fed into and organised the perceptual apparatus of the modern era.

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The Furnace

Coffee’s made, the tea-water’s on
and here's a glazed pane of iridescent frost
stroked by a ghost etcher’s point
—struck through with silver and laced with light:
its gravure of fern fronds glistens
on a clear silicon plate
……………….…………
And there's a brilliant postage stamp of blue
piercing an otherwise stratocumulus dome
marking a bit of sky beyond the frost-etcher’s art:
a frame within a frame a window in a window
a thought within a name
…………………………. The furnace sparks
the burner fires before the blower starts and
warm air rushes from a grate
as if a house might warm its cupped hands
to mitigate the lethal silence of a still cold place
as we will sometimes hunch and blow to mitigate
a frigid shadow stillness:
……………………………….a blast of breath
from our own deep furnace in winter
while we wait
………………….
by Jim Culleny, 12/18/09