Tag Archives: fir tree

Spam poetry: Forests of Puget Sound

I’ve been playing with spam lately; I find the auto-translated stuff a great source of amusement and inspiration. The wonky syntax and near-psychedelic word juxtapositions light up all kinds of brain activity. Sometimes I take whole chunks and try to punctuate them so they make some kind of sense in English; other times I lift choice bits from here and there and combine them to see what happens. Here’s my favorite poem from this morning’s work:

Forests of Puget Sound

On a great treelined side freeway, a sanctioned handsome conical
specimen with simple roots and sagging, greygreen sharp needles
matured with regard to wet, detailed mud.

Always those already established Northwest mystics (to find
a reasonably sultry painting of them) have been a far more spectral
only no less helpful presence.

We simply come across your wife’s perception openly
once, many years after the scandal.

On the twelfth day of Christmas…

We kicked off our Twelfth Night celebration last night by having pancakes and eggnog for supper. Then we played Bananagrams until about an hour past our usual bedtime, read aloud Chapter 5 of On the Blue Comet (a Christmas gift) and finally turned in.

The festivities continued this morning with the entire household sleeping late. Even the cat refrained from walking on our heads until almost 8:00. Unheard of! Everyone had surfaced by 10:00, at which point we agreed to watch the extended edition of The Two Towers. Breakfast was chocolate- and caramel-covered Boy Scout popcorn and soda. (In our defense, the caramel popcorn did have fancy nuts in it.)

Between discs (yes, this four-hour epic requires more than one DVD) we made pizza – Pillsbury’s whole-wheat pizza dough is a nice alternative to frozen pies. We rounded out our Tolkien overdose with more soda for the kids and hops-based beverages for the adults. It was 4:00 by the time the credits rolled, and we all needed showers.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASome shoe shopping, some ice skating, then supper at Culver’s. Now we’ve settled in at home again to watch the Vikings and the Pack face off at Lambeau Field. Tomorrow we’ll remove the decorations and put the tree on the deck to provide shelter for birds coming to the feeder, but for one more night it graces our living room with twinkling lights and the delicate scent of fir.

Some star ornaments will linger about the house through Epiphany, reminders of the star that beckoned to wise men of old, the morning star that shines for the peoples of the nations, and the people themselves, more numerous than the stars.

Even twelve drummers drumming is not loud enough to drown out the wonder and mystery of the silent night that began this season.