an owl in a box

Iola Mae is a quiet girl, filled with noise.  Even her name, eye-ohh-lahh-maay makes her tongue roll up inside her mouth.

Her mother is a loud woman, filled with mission.  When she calls her daughter, vowels fly through the air.  Time to go.  Time to rush.  There is a creature in a box in the front seat.  The car is full of thump, thump and owl, owl.

Tires spin on gravel, talons skid on cardboard.  The car rolls backwards and bumps down the dirt driveway.  The box lurches against the seat back.  Iola, safely belted in the rear, imagines a heavy fury on her lap that shifts precipitously across her bare legs towards her stomach.  Stop.  Forward.  The hum of smooth pavement will follow all the way to the animal shelter.  Rescue runs are familiar.  No turns, only so many stop signs.  Her mother sighs loudly.  The radio dials to the church channel.

Glory be to God for dappled things *

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

The wink-tick of releasing her seat belt is swallowed by the hymn.  She spies on the cardboard box, its lid folded shut or nearly shut.  The gap is dark and then it is not.  Yeh-lo-owwwl-eye.

Bits of sound fall like tiny planes whose engines cut in the sky far above the sea.  Without racket, clamor, roar or din, palisades build and tsunamis fail.  No ears nor tongue, hands and feet.  Only her eye peeled and adazzled.

Then her vision dims.  The breach in the box lid goes dark.

All things counter, original, spare, strange

The croon of rolling tires catches her up like a hammock strung between bending palms.  Her mother sighs loudly.  The car brakes gently for the first stop sign.

Whhhdjshhhdjh.

*Pied Beauty 1880 by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Tale I

The (Silent) Scream

Early 19th century illustration of Krakatoa

My recognition was immediate and satisfying. “A cartoon! She has an earache!” Mother bent down to my level and looked at the postcard in the carousel. She laughed and called over my father, my aunt, my grown cousins. They laughed. Behind the counter of the MOMA gift shop, the staff complete a cordon of laughter. Parents should teach their children to swear. Otherwise, the children risk becoming little stones that will not speak or eat until tired enough to soften and sleep. Fuck off giants.

She fears her mouth will open too wide. Her lips fluster around clinched teeth when he visits. The desire to yawn sends her into tears and agitation. For five days, an urgent and cumbersome hindrance failed to funnel out through her ears and now batters her teeth and rags her tongue. Some vile gorge might injure him even if he is elsewhere. Spewing out hot enough to scald the blue-black fjord and traveling on a bed of steam at a furious pace. Boats burst into flame. So too, the bridge.

The doctors tell him that she must release her jaw. They suspect that the pressure in her ears must be harrowingly acute.

The doctors, cognizant of Edvard’s strong sympathy for his sister Laura, tell him that his pain is an imaginary parallel suffering.

He fears her look. Even the windows of her asylum watch him as he crosses the bridge. Tall slits that once reflected cobalt and cerulean blues now glare cadmium red and orange. For five days, his head aches. Her silence quakes from one recess on the side of his head to the other.

* * *

Mahogany, brass and glass, the barographs are handsome. On August 27, 1883, these novel parlor toys record the explosion of Krakatoa, a hat-shaped spit of lava in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. A final cataclysmic blast has 13,000 (some say 21,000) times the atomic force of Hiroshima. An atmosphere bent by gravity provides the medium for gargantuan waves of sound that circle the globe in 36 hours and 27 minutes. And circle again and again from an absent point to all points. For five days, the barometers of Christiana (now Oslo) record the shock.

The Scream, Edvard Munch 1893

Peter Forakis was born in Hanna, Wyoming in 1927 and died on Thanksgiving Day, 2009.

This is our monumental miniature tribute to his Atlanta Gateway 1967. 100 feet by 200 feet by 100 feet, it was the largest steel sculpture ever created, and maybe still is.

In all photos we’ve seen, Peter is wearing overalls.

we are currently gathering a list of words.

Joseph Goldsborough Bruff's rebus letter, 1856

[on-uh-mat-uh-pee-uh]

iiiahh belongs with words (foosh, breedeet, fagroon, klubble) that mime the sounds made by things and beings.  Ideally, this category also welcomes the miming of soundless phenomenon such as irritation brewing or stars flickering.

Onomatopoeia, like all word categories, is loosey-goosey.  Sound miming flourishes in neighborhoods and tribes of all stripes.  There are scores of sound-scapes.  So even words that imitate sounds never perfectly correspond to the tenor of actual things.  Yet neither is the relationship arbitrary.

Onomatopoeia (the very word itself) teases the mouth and tugs the memory.  Words exceed pantomime and exist as things themselves with shape, breath, and scale.

for the moment, please consider this owl, as it considers you

owl looking

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