Dave Bonta

December 20, 2012December 21, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Ichigo Ichie (one lifetime, one encounter)

A tea gathering cannot be repeated, and the host and guests feel that this is an encounter that can only occur once in a lifetime.
—glossary, Japanese Tea Culture: The Omotesenke Tradition

The room isn’t right: too bright, too perfect,
despite its location in the most venerable
Zen temple in all Kyoto.
The one white lily is a cliché.
And the participants are far too numerous:
15 more than the optimal five.
Examining the implements cannot fail
to become a perfunctory exercise.
The wealthy ladies of the tea ceremony club
from Sakai—hometown of Sen no Rikyū—
sigh for the lack of wabi & sabi.
But then their special guest, a tall,
funny-looking foreigner, enters the room
& hits his head against a ceiling beam
with a satisfying thump.
He grins foolishly & everyone laughs.

How like Daruma now the kettle appears,
round & stolid! And the bamboo whisk
marooned in the dark bowl—how at home!
The foreigner settles into place
& the circle tightens a little
as everyone strains to hear his murmured Japanese,
so beautifully flawed.

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Words on the Street

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Disposition matrix: fragments

the melancholy of a straight line of same-sized trees

the principal’s chair like a golden cloak

how many roads

running toward the shooter, shouting

the vacuum of grief quickly fills with kitsch

I went to bed hungry & woke up full

“Would you like ketchup with your freedom fries?”

survivors at Virginia Tech described him as looking almost innocent in his scout uniform

I dreamt about writing a book titled war canoe

dried wildflowers could be incorporated into a quilt full of names

all young males in the target area are presumed to be terrorists

the terrible coolness of indifference

how many roads must a man

both of them running, pitching forward

according to the Washington Post, the expanded kill list is known as the “disposition matrix”

the melancholy of angels that never learned how to pollinate

“How many bees would you like?”

in my dream I loved how the deserted street felt to my bare feet

the children hidden like stowaways in lavatories & closets

coats from the Army-Navy store

a fisherman’s sweater knitted to look like fish scales

just as bullet points rarely liven up a slide presentation, the sound of a gun is far duller than you’d expect from the movies

it was dark before I reached the end of the block

“How would you prefer we got rid of the crows?”

after the power comes back, the clock can’t stop blinking

December 18, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Luisa Igloria on audience

The Bakery:

I am aware that much of my poetry works with recurrent themes involving place (I am always writing about my hometown— Baguio, it seems), the complicated dynamics of family, the often tangled relationships between history, time, and memory. […]

At the same time, I am aware of the desire to make a clear and accessible connection to readers, whoever they might be, while remaining true to my heart’s first subjects and passions. The notion of a “universal audience” has about the same significance and importance to me as the arguably comparable notion of a “global citizen.” (That is to say, the construct of universality which posits that underneath all the indices of identity, history, gender, etc. which mark us, we are essentially all the same, might be useful in certain contexts, but also undeniably dangerous for its potential to conflate the details of our histories, which are singular.) But also, I cannot believe that what I write would have relevance only for an audience “just like me,” or that such an audience really and truly exists.

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Mom at 36

While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.

December 17, 2012 by Dave Bonta

What’s mental illness got to do with it?

Coyote Crossing:

There’s just one particular form of mental illness that’s been found to be shared by a significant number of spree killers. It’s depression. At least a tenth of people in the U.S. have it, or have had it, myself among them. And there’s no conclusive causal link between the depression and spree killing.

You are not normal.

There is no normal. You may well be happy and well adjusted. I hope you are. I often am as well. But every single person is neurologically distinct. Normal is semantic, an arbitrary boundary on the bell curve between peak and long tail. Mentally ill, if it means anything at all, just means landing on the wrong side of that arbitrary line.

December 16, 2012December 17, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Poems vs. bullets

Today I happened to remember I’d written a poem in the voice of a hero from a previous school shooting. Romanian holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, blocked the doorway to keep the gunman from entering while his students got out through the windows, “into the garden.”

Let’s get real, you say. What good can poetry possibly do, faced with these kinds of horrific acts? I’d reply that anything that helps to deemphasize and demythologize the role of the killer can’t hurt. I tend to think that the mass media’s focus on the killers not only ensures that they will be remembered, but also encourages other violent, antisocial types to emulate them knowing they’ll get the same kind of notoriety. And notoriety might sometimes be just what such troubled young men are after. I love old-time murder ballads as much as anyone, but I think it’s time to put those behind us and stop feeding a gun culture that romanticizes lone killers and vigilantes.

I don’t believe that news reports should be censored, so how to combat the sensationalism? By elevating and memorializing those like Librescu who resisted, and who led truly exemplary lives besides. I hope it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing songs and poems about Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung and the other heroes of the massacre.

More than poems of mourning — which are also necessary, and which we poets are always Johnny-on-the-spot with after every major cataclysm — we need poems of celebration and defiance. We can’t allow the killers to dominate our memories of these events, just as we can’t allow the gun fetishists to continue to hijack public discussion of the role of violence in our culture and how to change it. If we do, to coin a phrase: the terrorists will have won.

December 15, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Wake

It doesn’t seem right,
looking at “the old moon

in the arms of the new,”
the dark part glowing

a bleary orange
with earthshine,

that we can still emit
so much radiance.

In response to Vigil.

December 14, 2012December 14, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Nocturne

For I am every dead thing.
John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”

December night. Meteors streak
through the bare crowns of oaks.

I watch the sky as if it were the sleeping face of a dreamer.
All that blazing action without a sound!

And the longer I look, the more unfamiliar it becomes,
wholly itself & yet possessed. Wild. Vulnerable.

I want to be present the way an oak is present
& stretch empty arms into the void.

December 12, 2012December 12, 2012 by Dave Bonta

I’m kind of a big deal on the web

Poets take note! There’s another critter out there even more adept than we are at hiding behind an enormous effigy of itself made entirely of garbage:

New Species of ‘Decoy’ Spider Likely Discovered At Tambopata Research Center

From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.

Step in even closer and things start to get weird— that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?

It turns out the master designer behind this somewhat creepy form is in fact a tiny spider, only about 5mm in body length, that is hiding behind or above that false, bigger spider made up of debris.