Heard By a Bird in Phonecia, New York
Sparrow
February 23, 2009 "It's much easier to be a bad artist than a bad mathematician."
- William G. Holzberger
Did you see the cloud resembling a five-armed coat over Chichester last Saturday?
A Letter
Dear Sparrow:
Yesterday I went walking in the new-fallen snow, and I found two sets of tracks: a deer's and a man's. The deer tracks stretched across my neighbor's front lawn. The man's tracks emerged from his door.
Humans are a door-opening and door-closing species.
A. R.
Goopy Plum-Sesame Salad Dressing
Purée in a blender:
1 ripe plum (without pit)
2 Tbs tahini
1 Tbs rolled oats
1/2 tsp salt
[We thank Henry C. Siegel for this recipe.]
T-shirt slogan:
Warning: I Am a Shopaholic. In Case of Emergency, Get Me to a Sale!
A Second Letter
Dear Sparrow:
Today my son Grange and I went for a walk, and found the largest tribe of motherless deer I've ever seen. I counted 14. They were all yearlings, or double-yearlings. The smallest one was the size of a German shepherd. Four or five of them stared at us, then they all ran east, in profile -- looking like figures on a Sumerian vase.
Where was their mother? Killed, or maybe a drug addict?
J. O.
Bumper sticker:
NOW SOMEONE THROW A SHOE AT CHENEY!
Shandaken Poetry Laboratory
Definition
single cell phone - portable phone for amoebas
- J. Ambroset
Spell
I have forgotten
how to spell.
(My cousin Bill
corrects my poems.)
- Mary Plere
3 Feet
Mine, and one
of my mother's.
- Nancy Golvan
Interview with a Stairway Artist
I spoke with Theodorus Miller in his studio in Shandaken.
Sparrow: You build stairways, I believe.
Miller: I am the only person building ceramic stairways in the USA.
Sparrow: What type of ceramics?
Miller: The texture varies widely. I can make shiny white porcelain or granular earth tones. Last summer I built a staircase in Albuquerque that looks like it's made out of bread.
Sparrow: Can't ceramics steps crack?
Miller: With the high-density clays nowadays, there's no danger of breakage.
Sparrow: Do you fire the whole stairway at once?
Miller: I could, if I had a kiln the size of Wal-Mart! [Laughs.] No, I fire a third of a step at a time.
Sparrow: So then you connect the parts?
Miller: Yes, we use self-dissolving adhesives.
Sparrow: What are you working on now?
Miller: Just a simple three-step descent into a sunken living room in Olive. On the side of each step I'm adding mushrooms.
Sparrow: What kind of mushrooms?
Miller: At the moment, I'm on lots of mycology sites on the Internet, trying to decide. I'm leaning towards crown toadstools (Stropharia coronilla). They're poisonous.
Sparrow: Do you have any plans for the future?
Miller: For the past two and a half years I've been trying to build a ceramic kite. Three weeks ago I had a breakthrough.
Sparrow: What was it?
Miller: I'd rather not say. Other ceramicists might be reading this. Come back and interview me again when I'm done.
Sparrow: Sure!
Pajama Wrap
"In my family, we didn't waste money on wrapping paper," Anna Cybill recalls. "We just wrapped all our gifts in pajamas."
Tags: Sparrow , Phoenicia , Heard , Bird , Poet
