Grief Bacon

This entry is part 14 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Split gravestone

Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.
15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

Strip of blubber
sputtering on
high heat,
red stripe
that whispers
to the whip,
curling like
a tongue
at touch of
something bitter,
shrinking
& shriveling like
a spent cock
or drought-
struck leaf,
turning brittle
as the cover
of an old pulp
magazine,
ah bacon—
if I were to
bring you home,
it would be
as a flag
draped over
a coffin,
red & white
& red,
or some
long rash
I’d feed with
nervous nails.

Blueberry picking at Bear Meadows bog: a public service message


Watch on VimeoWatch on YouTube.

I took a break from berry picking yesterday to record this important message for anyone considering making the trip to Bear Meadows to pick highbush blueberries. (I didn’t have a tripod with me; I just strapped the camera to a sturdy blueberry bush.) The patch is completely over-rated. In addition to all the dangers I enumerate in the video, it’s also quite easy to get lost if you try to take the scenic route back through the state forest, as my mother and I discovered yesterday. One wrong turn and we became hopelessly disoriented, despite the fact that I’ve visited this part of the forest many, many times, on car and on foot. The state forest roads all look pretty much alike. Conclusion: please stay at home and watch cat videos on the internet. Thank you.

Woodrat Podcast 43: Marly Youmans in Wales

Marly Youmans with an ancient yew on the grounds of Powis Castle
admiring yew #35 on the grounds of Powis Castle

Even though my friend the poet and novelist Marly Youmans lives just five hours away from me in upstate New York, we went all the way to Wales to record this podcast. How’s that for dedication? We start out at a tea house on the grounds of Powis Castle, where we’re joined by another novelist and blogger, Clare Dudman. Then we go to Ty Isaf, the stately Clive Hicks-Jenkins residence near Aberystwyth, where we talk about such topics as the ghosts of Cooperstown, New York; whether children are an inspiration or a hindrance for a busy writer; women leaving the world for the woods; and how writing in rhyme resembles surfing. We are serenaded by rooks.

Marly’s latest book of poems is The Throne of Psyche and her latest novel is Val/Orson. She blogs at The Palace at 2:00 a.m. and tweets about raspberries and radishes.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Stepping into the heat


Watch on Vimeo.

A small, volunteer sunflower growing alongside the footpath between my house and my folks’ house has attracted a huge following, from mordelid beetles to flea beetles to some kind of plant bug that lurk on the back side. Add to that the small wasps and bees coming in for shorter visits, and it’s quite a happening little scene.

That’s what tempted me to stand out in the sun for ten minutes yesterday evening videoing it. But when I brought up the clips on my desktop monitor, it was the sun-struck footage rather than the footage focused more on the insects that seemed the most striking. I hadn’t had anything specific in mind when I shot it, but I picked up my copy of Nic S.‘s book Forever Will End On Thursday and quickly found a nearly perfect fit: the poem “homesteader,” which begins:

I step into the heat
as into a dress

the sun fits me, it is
my size

and the heat is
face-shaped…

Every time I make a videopoem, even one as simple as this, I feel I learn something new. This time, I discovered that the natural sound from the video itself made a perfectly satisfactory soundtrack, as long as I was careful, in my couple of splices, not to cut off the field sparrow in mid-song. I’m also refining my technique for massaging the poetry reading. In general, I find it necessary to lengthen the spaces between phrases when adapting a sound recording for use in a videopoem, in order to counteract the distraction-effect of the video images and give the words time to sink in. Nic’s readings lend themselves especially well to this kind of spacing, since her readings are already slower and more clearly articulated than most other people’s. On the other hand, there’s nothing that says a viewer or listener has to catch every word on the first listen. We certainly don’t have that expectation with music!

This is my third video so far for a poem by Nic S.. In case you missed them, the other two were “on being constantly civil towards death” and “the wanderers’ blessing.” Two other videos used Nic’s readings (originally recorded for Whale Sound): “hollow” (text by Peter Stephens — possibly my best videopoem to date) and “A Bigfoot Poem,” Nic’s rendering of one of my own pieces.

Heat Indices

This entry is part 13 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Sad broken angel

Bombs go off right across the world
from where I live, among a people who
look like me. This is news because
they are not at war — or at least,
not very much — & because they look
just like me. Meanwhile in America
we are blowing up mountains
& burning their black hearts to keep cool.
Meanwhile in America we are setting off
three & a half million pounds of explosives
every day in this undeclared war
against ourselves. This is not news because
it happens every day & is therefore
nothing new; because there is no easy-
to-tar enemy except perhaps for
the black-hearted mountains;
& because the people who die from it
die slowly & unspectacularly,
& are too often guilty of being poor.
Meanwhile in America it is hot
& getting hotter, & this is news
because it keeps us indoors, glued
to the news or at least to the sweat-
sticky couch. Meanwhile in America
the news anchors make a show
of indignation at the sun, righteous
& well-coiffed as fallen angels, &
never speculate about why we might
really be so hot, never mention
that we are blowing up mountains
& burning their black hearts to keep cool.

*

Note: I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the events in Norway, which now seem actually to be more about the massacre on the island than the initial bomb blasts. Every violent death, especially the death of a child, is a tragedy regardless of where in the world it happens — even schoolchildren in Appalachia who get brain tumors from having the misfortune of living too close to coal processing plants.

John Davis visits Plummer’s Hollow as part of TrekEast

Cross-posted to the Plummer’s Hollow website.

John Davis photographing downy rattlesnake plantain in our 3-acre deer exclosure

UPDATE (6/22): Listen to Emily Reddy’s interview with John in Plummer’s Hollow for a news story on our local NPR station, WPSU.

(For the record, Bruce Bonta is Marcia Bonta’s husband, not her son! I’m the son.)

*

We’ve been honored to host John Davis from the Wildlands Network for two nights in Plummer’s Hollow as part of his epic, 6,000-mile muscle-powered journey to raise awareness of wildlands connectivity in the eastern U.S. and Canada. He started in Key Largo in February and hopes to make it to the Gaspe Peninsula by October, traveling by boat, hiking, and biking, visiting as many wildlands in the East as possible. You can follow along via the TrekEast blog on the Wildlands Network website and/or follow @TrekEast on Twitter for more up-to-the-minute photos and brief audio blogposts.

John pitched camp in the woods up beyond the garage, and uploaded three different audio posts last night and this morning, before getting underway around 7:00.

Woodrat (2:48)

Energy Assault (3:04)

Nature and Energy (3:21)

John Davis' campsite in Plummer's HollowJohn was one of the founders of Wild Earth magazine and the Wildlands Project, as it was then called, which together played a pivotal role in shaping our own thinking as eco-centric forest stewards, helping us see how our property fit into the larger conservation picture, and making us strong advocates for ecosystem recovery and large carnivore restoration, among other things. So we were pleased to be able to meet John and show him around the property, and compare notes about the environmental movement over the past 25 years. Also, as a long-time blogger and multimedia guy, I must say I’m very impressed by the electronic communications system John and his support staff have set up. He’s an excellent extemporaneous speaker, as the audio posts demonstrate, and also a gifted listener, so if you get a chance to go see him as TrekEast continues, don’t miss it. (His next appearance is this very evening in State College — see the Centre Daily Times for details.)

John Davis - heading out

Superb frozen drink machine (unsolicited email)

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Among the Brambles

This entry is part 12 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Brambly grave

Working through a black-
berry patch, you learn
a new way to move, step
high & slow as a heron,
pivot to trample back-
wards in your big boots,
& lean nimble as a lover
into the fiercest thorns
to get free. These are
not skills of widespread
applicability. But one
day when the sweat dries
& the mosquito’s skirl
dwindles to a soft wind
in the inner ear, you may
find yourself stretching,
stretching, stretching for
that last sweet berry
& wondering why in hell
your hand won’t move.

Artifactual

This entry is part 11 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Faceless statue

When a relationship dies, what happens
to the orphaned plus sign?
Might it live on as a cemetery cross
marking some otherwise dubious grave?
At one time it could’ve been reborn as
a TV antenna mast or the minimal
skeleton of a scarecrow. Now
even crossroads seem archaic,
& a crucifix is a piece of jewelry
to finger in times of stress,
finger & twirl on its chain
around the neck — a thing humans wear
instead of a bell.
In extreme cases, the plus sign
can lose its vertical axis
& merge with the horizon,
beyond which, as we know,
there’s nothing but subtraction.

Eating roast ox at the outhouse races


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday I went to Martinsburg, Pennsylvania with a couple of friends to take in the newly-revived tradition there of outhouse races, a fundraising event sponsored by the local firehall. This was my first exposure to an activity of apparently quite widespread popularity: a Google search for “outhouse race” turns up photos, videos and articles on events from the Ozarks to Michigan to Alaska. One of the outhouses in attendance (and the one that won) bore a painting of the Confederate flag, which led me to wonder whether outhouse racing is seen as a Southern thing originally.

Contestants were judged on design as well as speed, and each outhouse had an occupant and four pushers. There weren’t that many outhouses this year, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. It was, among other things, a rolling display of folk art, notional shithouses with painted-on names — The Midnight Dumpster, The Boss’s Office. They ran multiple heats and everyone yucked it up. One of the outhouses lost a wheel, but otherwise there were no NASCAR-style crashes. I suggested they have a pit crew next year, but making a pit stop in an outhouse might be kind of redundant, come to think of it.

Afterwards, we joined the crowd at the pavilions in the park, where the firemen were cooking cheap dinner fare — roast ox sandwiches for $2.00, barbecued chicken for $4.00. I had the former: a round, brown patty in a bun. It wasn’t too bad slathered with condiments. We sat with a friendly couple who, seeing our photographic equipment, peppered us with suggestions of cool things to go see in Pennsylvania. He had worked for Conrail, he said, but quit after “the rebels” (meaning Norfolk-Southern, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia) took it over and ran roughshod over workers — a story I’ve heard before.

Afterwards, we sat out on the main drag until dusk, talking and watching a steady stream of classic cars, tricked-out Harleys and other outlandish vehicles go past. It was an all-American kind of day, I thought. I was led to muse about how, as a people, we are in love with speed and consumption. The result: when we gotta go, we gotta go.

*

I got home to discover my night-blooming cereus had opened, filling the room with a pungent, aromatic scent. By morning, it had already deflated, consigned, as it were, to the midnight dumpster.