Today, I set my torch aglow on my hillfort, but not in warning to the next guest blogger, rather to signal welcome to this fine community before I go off to forage. I have not been "heaping up," lately, and this task of composing prose posts on what informs my poetry has informed me of some poems to write. (Aside from the Greek and Latin origins to "poet" that sound similar and define as "make," poet also derives from the Sanskrit word "cinoti," meaning "he heaps up.")
It is mating season in the northern hemisphere, and that means the gentleman humpback whales will be singing to communicate their fitness to the lady whales. At least that's the updated answer on why they sing. The fact that they never sing their particular songs again and invent new ones proposes that they are more advanced than our species, at least enough to not give a girl a line. Biologists refer to the humpbacks as "inveterate composers" and yet that they might be singing for the pure pleasure of it and their own satisfaction is "an untestable question in scientific terms." I wonder what the humpback anthropologists and musicologists make of human punk rock? Or, recordings of Dean Martin?
Anyway, I hope I have stayed within the bounds of usufruct here at Best American Poetry, using this space for my enjoyment without ruining the substance of it. It's been a pleasure. I'm off to a five year old's birthday party on this 40 degree Spring day. The sun is shining, the sky is pale blue, and I see a small cloud in the shape of a dove. Well, until that airplane drove through it.
