As published in The Weekly Avocet

                     Dobsonfly


The Hellgrammite has a painful bite,
and their pinchers give a horrid fright.

They hide in the rocks and shun the light;
for a smallmouth bass finds their flesh a delight.

The shed their skin before taking flight to
transcend the world of Hellgrammite.

Ray Zimmerman - Chattanooga, TN - znaturalist at gmail.com

Coolidge and Renaissance Parks present a variety of images, from the utilitarian to recreational to natural beauty. 

My Nature Journaling group, which meets on Tuesday mornings, got special permission to visit this lovely property. Thanks to the land trust organization which protects it. 

All shot at Chickamauga Dam. The goose was not impressed by the heron's antics. 

I was at Amnicola Marsh, intent on capturing an image of a Great Egret when this Green Heron flew out of the vegetation and landed in the foreground. Below is a distant image of the Great Egret, captured at Amnicola Marsh and some images from the Brainerd Levee including a Red-wing Blackbird, a Great Blue Heron, and an insect on some vetch. Note that it does not have the rounded posterior contour on its abdomen of which  bees normally have. It may be a mimic. 

Chickamauga Dam, April 29, 2019

1 Icarus got too close to the sun; fell to earth when wings of wax melted.
2 The meadow vole never hears the owl’s wings.
3 Monarch butterflies cross a continent to mate in trees of Mexico.
4 Leonardo designed flying machines that never took to the air.
5 I still dream of flying and really want a set of mechanical wings like those worn by the protagonist in the movie Brazil.
6 Only when designers gave up on the idea of wings which flapped did the reach the skies.
7 That driver is flying low. 

Alabama Highway 75
 Words from the Labyrinth Ray Zimmerman (c) 2014
​
Churches without steeples line the road.
Buildings Methodist and Pentecostal pass my view
as the car radio blasts out Johnny Cash.
 
It’s not just any tune by Cash, but
a religious classic recorded near his death,
“When the Man Comes Around.”
 
Despite the apocalyptic images in the song
I see only one church that boasts the name
Holiness, and none mention “Signs Following.”
 
My mind is on that book, Salvation on Sand Mountain
as one other church boasts a “No Denominational” sign,
but I still see no indication of snake handlers.
 
I can’t blame those folks if they’re circumspect.
Strangers might confuse their services with theater,
though one should never make a circus of another’s beliefs.
 
If it’s rattlesnakes you want, I once photographed a beauty
crawling along another mountain, up near Mentone.
Big around as my forearm, she must have been pregnant.
 
A Chattanooga naturalist once took a program to a church.
She delighted the audience with hawks and owls.
At the harmless blacksnake, someone shouted,
“Wait, it’s not that kind of church.”

The Zen of Cranes
 
This poem appeared in my brief self-published chapbook Words from the Labyrinth which I distributed to friends instead of holiday greeting cards one year.
© Ray Zimmerman, 2014
 
Cranes circle over Dayton, Tennessee, turn eastward.
Said to be an ancient species with millennia of history,
they provide a tourist attraction for neighboring Meigs County.
 
Dayton is home to Bryan College, named for an attorney.
He prosecuted a man named Scopes for teaching
human evolution, a banned subject at the time.
 
Bryan won his case against the famous
Clarence Darrow after losing a presidential bid,
as dramatized in the film, Inherit the Wind.
 
Faculty at Bryan College sign an oath affirming
Young Earth Creationism, implying the cranes
could not have a history of more than five thousand years.
 
The trial is presented again and again in a festival and play.
Tourists are asked to join a debate in which the cranes offer no opinion.
They seem to enjoy the corn fields though.

​A few months ago, I tried to recast some of my performance art as essays. The experiment was an abysmal failure.
Performance art depends on audience interaction, or at least audience response to the speaker, It is art for the ear, not for the page. I have long known art which sparkles on the page may well fall flat on the stage. I now suspect that the converse is true as well.
I have often seen the author of a prize-winning story, essay, or poem fall flat when reading from the stage I used to write this off to delivery, but I now believe the issue may ring deeper. Performance is, I believe, a genre all its own. It is sometimes grouped with poetry, possibly because poets often give public readings of their work. Of course, plays were originally written in verse, and Aristotle’s classic work, The Poetics, is a work for playwrights.
So Poetry, Performance Art, and Plays may have a common thread holding them together, but each is its on genre, as is storytelling, one which may have more in common with performance art than the others. Here is a link to a video of me reading several poems in front of an audience. The very first work is performance art, and you may notice a subtle difference between it an the others.  
It appears on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/PechaKuchaChattanooga