< the universe >

[rayheinrich]

Thanks for the suggestions Dale. I've made a few changes based on those.

My good friend (and wonderful poet) Michael Mcneilley used to say:
"The only jokes you have to explain are the bad ones."

Now if my poem had gone as planned, you'd have been sucked into the rhythm
and not needed an explanation. But... this is what I was trying to do:

This poem (like the one mentioned below) is written as a chant. A chant is
like a dance; if you screw up the rhythm you fall over. Repetition provides
some of it, but most of it depends on uniform stressing. In this poem the
first two lines are intentionally irregular, but after that it's strictly
one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed one. (While some lines are
Iambic and some are Trochaic, the I. line in an I. to T. transition has an extra
unstressed syl. at the end and the T. line in a T. to I. transition has an extra
stressed syl. at the end.)


This one is written as a chant as well:
< a window on whose other side is everything >
http://www.pigpenpoetry.com/showthread.php?tid=12785

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I never would have guessed that the photo was a precipitate of Alizarin crimson pigment. It looks like it has the texture of crumpled red tissue paper. Wonderful, was your grandfather a chemist? A whole universe mushrooms from this microcosm. Interesting transition from white, and the rice symbolism for life/fertility/wealth, to red for blood/biology/war and suffering.

My grandfather was a barber but one of his hobbies was photography.
So he knew a bit about chemistry from that. But he learned a lot more
from experimentation and reading. My dad became a chemical engineer
partly because of his dad's encouragement.
The reason my granddad had a tank of dye (actually he had quite a few)
was that he made color prints using dye imbibition. This is quite difficult
and very few hobbyists (or professionals for that matter) have ever
even attempted it. (His reds were to die for!!)