noun
a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, as in "you have hissed the mystery lectures," accidentally spoken instead of the intended "you have missed the history lectures."
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: named after the Rev. W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), an English scholar who reputedly made such errors in speaking.
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you peel an orange in one, long skin. reassemble it minus its belly. leave a pennybank slot in the top to drop a treasure.
an orange tabby, the color of a cantaloupe: fruit is one of the plates i'm spinning. plates are one of the places i spin from. i hate being dependent on food and water. i don't want to be dependent on anything. i leave my last saucer of milk on the back step, trying. my Declaration of Independence. later, when i'm hungry, i start nibbling my lower lip. way down in thought, i can't decide, my vertical dive, near the bottom where those toothy glow-fish live.
leave me be, i'm eating a submarine sandwich.
i'm designed to operate completely submerged in the see for long periods.
i'll sea you in the morning.
i can't think straight when i'm wet, or hungry, or chasing a glowing worm-lure around the ocean. i got a bowl of plankton for my brother for christmas, but i've decided to keep it: the lighting in my ship is all wrong. i'm trying to get it right. a little less incandescence, a little more lighthouse, starboard, bioluminescence. about ninety percent of the organisms who live in the ocean have the capability to produce light.
fireflies, the lights / flights of my life.
bioluminescence is the only source of light in the deep ocean where sunlight does not penetrate. the earth is swarming with animals.
i had to fill out this form, and sign my name. are you ready? not really. a little lightheaded. nekton verses plankton. one can swim on her own, independently of water currents, the other must drift in the directions of the tides, her Bigger Picture. the mutual enrapture of the moon and the sun. do i really have to choose? can i not be both.
sea what i mien.
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an orange tabby, the color of a cantaloupe: fruit is one of the plates i'm spinning. plates are one of the places i spin from. i hate being dependent on food and water. i don't want to be dependent on anything. i leave my last saucer of milk on the back step, trying. my Declaration of Independence. later, when i'm hungry, i start nibbling my lower lip. way down in thought, i can't decide, my vertical dive, near the bottom where those toothy glow-fish live.
leave me be, i'm eating a submarine sandwich.
i'm designed to operate completely submerged in the see for long periods.
i'll sea you in the morning.
i can't think straight when i'm wet, or hungry, or chasing a glowing worm-lure around the ocean. i got a bowl of plankton for my brother for christmas, but i've decided to keep it: the lighting in my ship is all wrong. i'm trying to get it right. a little less incandescence, a little more lighthouse, starboard, bioluminescence. about ninety percent of the organisms who live in the ocean have the capability to produce light.
fireflies, the lights / flights of my life.
bioluminescence is the only source of light in the deep ocean where sunlight does not penetrate. the earth is swarming with animals.
i had to fill out this form, and sign my name. are you ready? not really. a little lightheaded. nekton verses plankton. one can swim on her own, independently of water currents, the other must drift in the directions of the tides, her Bigger Picture. the mutual enrapture of the moon and the sun. do i really have to choose? can i not be both.
sea what i mien.
.
just at the edge, where solid and liquid mix to make mud
i was probably eight years old, but does this have to be about me? i ate a frog-egg. and i mean i really ate it. i didn't just lick it or put it on my tongue and spit it out, i actually ate it. i was in a pond. i was covered in muck. it was so lord-of-the-flies or something. i didn't have a lilypad in my eye. the ground didn't crack open like a speckled brown egg with a yellow yolky duckling inside. instead, it was slimy and slippery and slipped down my throat and nothing happened. julie rolph was sitting next to me in the pond, lakeblue eyes big like globes, wet with reflected pondwater. swimming minnows. something. i think we were naked. i think we were tired of kissing captured (terrified, peeing) frogs and toads and were going for something more consequential. we were waiting for some magic to happen. to rise up from out of the muck and prove itself, like it does. does it?
there was a church on that island. bear island, it was called. in the summertime we paddled a canoe across the lake to the island. once we brought a whole garbage bag full of barbie and her friends and their endless pink and white artillery. it sat on the bottom of the canoe all the way to the island. sloshy. i don't think we ever even played with it. there was always a more interesting Very Important mission to take on. like that church, for example. there was something spooked about it, something always-autumn, something like a bucket to catch a leak that has a long way to fall. that hollow plunk or thump. julie rolph and i would take these Very Important pilgrimages to the church, which was on some other edge of the island, just to spook ourselves. the titillation of some old-fangled danger. shades of brown. stain-colored, iodine. abandoned birds' nests. colonial ghosts. witch-dust. in the winter when we couldn't canoe we cross-country skied across the lake. all winter long, back and forth. walking on water.
in my memory of that island, there's something very salem witch-trialy about it. something tutuba, scarlet letter, something rustling the autumn underbrush. some kind of trap we never got caught in, but that danger was so delicately infused into everything. sun through birches, sun sinking into water, long afternoon lakeshadows shaped like mysterious creatures, like intrigue, dangerous ideas. all of it you could walk right through, the light and dark moving, falling across your eyes in ancient patterns like water seems to. we were a maple-people. a lake-people. a canoe-people with some sunwarmed water splashing the bottom around our sneakers. it's how lorine says fish / fowl / flood / water lily mud / my life, that makes me love her.
what's a giant bird that starts with a vowel? it's not a riddle. the church was in the forest, and so was the frogpond because everything on the island was. it was a cut-out chunk of new england forest floating belly-side-up and all by itself in the middle of that giant lake. is there a shadow under an island? i was never really afraid of the dark, but i was afraid of the shadow of our little sailboat. treading water in my smudgy tangerine life-jacket, i'd imagine that the shadow was a whale and it was looming just under my feet, waiting for it's chance to gobble me. the lake-whale became an almost mythological creature, showing up every time i swam from the boat. i never told anybody. nobody knows about the lake-whale but you and me.
so but that bird- that bird lived in the forest with everything else, on the way to the church. it's nest was high up in this tree. was it birch? maple? something. a lot of birch out there. skinny white trunks you could bend like licorice. dug-up bone-colored. the nest was enormous. at the edge of my mind, it's as big as a treehouse. five stories high in its licorice branches. if the nest was that big, julie rolph reasoned, how big was the bird? it wasn't egret or osprey, definitely not ostrich- that bird could fly. i never saw it. i imagined its wingspan as big as a rooftop. a bird who could drape itself over a crumbling church. a bird who casts a shadow big as a boat. i recently discovered the largest flying bird who ever lived. its name was (is) Argentavis Magnificens, which means "magnificent argentine bird". six-million years ago, Magnificens wandered the andes mountains and the treeless plains of argentina with a wingspan of 19 to 26 feet, a height of 6.5 feet, and a weight of 140 to 180 pounds. feather-size for this bird is estimated to have been about 5 feet long. though it may have needed a downhill running-start into a headwind to get off the ground, it is said that Magnificens was an excellent glider, like a sail plane.
how much do you think a five-foot-long feather would weigh?
.
there was a church on that island. bear island, it was called. in the summertime we paddled a canoe across the lake to the island. once we brought a whole garbage bag full of barbie and her friends and their endless pink and white artillery. it sat on the bottom of the canoe all the way to the island. sloshy. i don't think we ever even played with it. there was always a more interesting Very Important mission to take on. like that church, for example. there was something spooked about it, something always-autumn, something like a bucket to catch a leak that has a long way to fall. that hollow plunk or thump. julie rolph and i would take these Very Important pilgrimages to the church, which was on some other edge of the island, just to spook ourselves. the titillation of some old-fangled danger. shades of brown. stain-colored, iodine. abandoned birds' nests. colonial ghosts. witch-dust. in the winter when we couldn't canoe we cross-country skied across the lake. all winter long, back and forth. walking on water.
in my memory of that island, there's something very salem witch-trialy about it. something tutuba, scarlet letter, something rustling the autumn underbrush. some kind of trap we never got caught in, but that danger was so delicately infused into everything. sun through birches, sun sinking into water, long afternoon lakeshadows shaped like mysterious creatures, like intrigue, dangerous ideas. all of it you could walk right through, the light and dark moving, falling across your eyes in ancient patterns like water seems to. we were a maple-people. a lake-people. a canoe-people with some sunwarmed water splashing the bottom around our sneakers. it's how lorine says fish / fowl / flood / water lily mud / my life, that makes me love her.
what's a giant bird that starts with a vowel? it's not a riddle. the church was in the forest, and so was the frogpond because everything on the island was. it was a cut-out chunk of new england forest floating belly-side-up and all by itself in the middle of that giant lake. is there a shadow under an island? i was never really afraid of the dark, but i was afraid of the shadow of our little sailboat. treading water in my smudgy tangerine life-jacket, i'd imagine that the shadow was a whale and it was looming just under my feet, waiting for it's chance to gobble me. the lake-whale became an almost mythological creature, showing up every time i swam from the boat. i never told anybody. nobody knows about the lake-whale but you and me.
so but that bird- that bird lived in the forest with everything else, on the way to the church. it's nest was high up in this tree. was it birch? maple? something. a lot of birch out there. skinny white trunks you could bend like licorice. dug-up bone-colored. the nest was enormous. at the edge of my mind, it's as big as a treehouse. five stories high in its licorice branches. if the nest was that big, julie rolph reasoned, how big was the bird? it wasn't egret or osprey, definitely not ostrich- that bird could fly. i never saw it. i imagined its wingspan as big as a rooftop. a bird who could drape itself over a crumbling church. a bird who casts a shadow big as a boat. i recently discovered the largest flying bird who ever lived. its name was (is) Argentavis Magnificens, which means "magnificent argentine bird". six-million years ago, Magnificens wandered the andes mountains and the treeless plains of argentina with a wingspan of 19 to 26 feet, a height of 6.5 feet, and a weight of 140 to 180 pounds. feather-size for this bird is estimated to have been about 5 feet long. though it may have needed a downhill running-start into a headwind to get off the ground, it is said that Magnificens was an excellent glider, like a sail plane.
how much do you think a five-foot-long feather would weigh?
.
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