Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I don’t like to write about myself too often, but a personal blogger can’t avoid it altogether. A few things about family here, too.
found in peat
part-way to coal
the hide under his fur
has weathered further than leather
and his rib cage still holds
a deathless canary
he’ll never fix that leaky faucet
you know the one
a chip chip chip
off the old flint
adamant under pressure
something gleams
the green of moss on an oak
three years dead
the green of greenbriar
on which a deer has grazed
the green of a bench in the woods
where vows were once exchanged
the green of garlic mustard
before it becomes too bitter
the green of ferns that have borne
the weight of snow
the green of winter wheat in the distance
when the sun comes out
the green of lichen on a rock
finding everything it needs
the green of leaves that won’t return
to a toppled witness tree
the old green of trailing arbutus
rushing into bloom for a few cold flies
Plummer’s Hollow, PA
March 17, 2024
It’s below zero Fahrenheit with a howling wind just two nights past the longest of the year. The juniper tree I planted next to the house thumps against the eaves. In my youth I’d be living it up, blasting the stereo while getting roaring drunk and feeding wood to a stove some visitors once dubbed Ol’ Sparky. Now I am apparently grown old, it’s sit hunched over a keypad and worry about what to do if the power goes out.
Every winter I vow to winterize this old plank-wall farmhouse. Every summer, foolish woodrat, I forget. I blame Janus, that two-faced bastard. Resolutions aren’t solutions.
*
Just about every decade, I re-read the Norse sagas, I’m not sure why. It’s hard to look away from their grimy brutality and insights into human and inhuman character. Today: Eyrbyggja Saga. I’d remembered it had some horror elements but had forgotten just how many walking dead there were—holy hell. It’s the world’s first folk horror novel! Complete with a haunted cow.
i was your beast
of unburden
the arctic and its
crickets of ice
grew on me like fine
hairs of mold
i mistook a molt
for metamorphosis
but once we all knew
how to make change
now they round us down
to the nearest hole
and hand out wafers
of ukrainian jesus
my poems are ladders
that lead nowhere
i could be on a jet writing
contrails across the sky
instead of these two
scrawny lines
giving my apple core a toss
watching it arc
and land in a forest clearing
i think of you Dad
saying where should i plant
an apple tree today
a habit from boyhood summers
at your uncle’s orchard
continuing into your college days
on a motor scooter
with Mom exploring every mountain
and forest in Pennsylvania
the fall and only the fall
was for apples
culminating in your favorite
the stayman winesap
but after all those cores
for all those years
you’re in the ground
now yourself
and i keep looking
for those wild apple trees
the sun was a letter
of the alphabet then
my stomach could pronounce it
better than my mouth
on the walk to school through
two centuries of wreckage
past a ghost village
and the end of town eaten
by the interstate
along train tracks we knew
to get off of when
they started to hum
up over the wooded hill
in the center of town
with its water tank and cemetery
past hidden rooms
with walls of wild grapevines
whispering truancy
down into the industrial classroom
a prison of numbers
where zero seemed to hold
all the keys
without issue i can feel the forest
thicken within me
build up fuel and hunger
for that incendiary spark
ah to slash and burn
plow and harrow with my ancestors
or cut down the old giants
and replace them with windmills
deadly flowers scything
the air for migrants
our doom laid out
like a meal for ravens
fates intertwining like fingers
at a lovers’ leap
a mile and a half up a mountain hollow
under the green banners of the sun
I live above a crawl space
too poor for a cellar
my garden is a banquet
for slugs and meadow voles
the wild mountain mint hums
with solitary bees
Never having believed in happiness, it occurs to me, might have had something to do with why i never actively pursued it. If it showed up regardless, well and good, but in general, day-to-day contentment seemed enough. And you know, maybe it is. For far too many around the world, it’s an unattainable dream.
But what about love, Dave?
And you call yourself a poet!
Pleiades
syncopating
crickets
1
ruby-throated hummingbird
fresh from the jewelweed
hangs in front of my mouth
like an unhoused question
I spread my fingers wide
skin wrinkles like old bark
2
I grew up climbing trees
hugging the trunks for dear life
or digging for treasure
at the old farm dump
that green- or purple-stained glass
that once held whiskey
3
buzzing from one bright
flame to the next
what rain-soaked radiance
precedes a fall
and where might petals unfurl
if we ever woke up
This morning on my walk I was pondering the question of why, when I was going through my first heartbreak back in my early 20s, I burrowed so deep into blues music to the almost complete exclusion of country western. Unlike most of my contemporaries I didn’t grow up listening to rock; my parents were into classical and a bit of folk (The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives), and my older brother played old-time banjo. So the first time I heard Delta blues guitar, I didn’t think “Wow, that sounds just like the Rolling Stones!” but “Wow, that sounds just like a clawhammer tune in a modal key!” Which, as I discovered years later when a friend lent me a Smithsonian Folkways compilation of very early recordings of Black string bands, is pretty much how that music evolved.
So that’s why I was prepared to like the country blues, but doesn’t explain why I ignored country western. Too schmaltzy, I always said, but that wasn’t fair to many country singers who avoid the schmaltz. Really, I think it was just that I preferred the more stoic and tough-minded approach to the expression of emotion in blues lyrics compared to the typical display of emotional vulnerability in country music.
And that too reflects how I was raised: in a loving but somewhat emotionally repressed family where it was exceedingly uncommon for anyone to ever talk about their feelings.
Also, virtually every traditional bluesman or woman I’ve ever read an interview with, when asked to define the blues, included in their answer the contention that blues is medicine. I can personally vouch for that. For a young person, at any rate, it was a mighty salve. In part I’m sure that was because so much of how we relate to each other, sexually and otherwise, has been fundamentally shaped by Black culture, with blues and rock lyrics as a major conduit. Blues and jazz changed the entire tenor of our civilization, made us freer and I believe also happier. Or at least a lot less sad.
These days though I don’t listen to much blues, and I’m not sure why. Music isn’t the all-powerful drug it was in my 20s and 30s. I’ve spent too many years listening to “the music of what happens.” John Cage was on to something. There’s music pretty much everywhere if you choose to hear it that way. I doubt it has the healing power of the blues in and of itself, but the physical effort required to go outside and explore such music will keep you on your feet long after most other concert-goers have checked out.
***
I love the fact that one of the most important American poets for actually understanding America was half Japanese: Ai. Another had an English father and a Puerto Rican mother: William Carlos Williams. Maybe you have to be half outside, half inside to see a thing for what it is.
***
I’m watching a small, black wasp flying from leaf to leaf and walking in circles with her antennae down, a female ninja seeking her target: a caterpillar of just the right species to act as unwilling nursery and food source for her progeny.
There’s not much to say about this that hasn’t already been said, by Darwin among others appalled by this apparent refutation of any notion of a just or benign cosmic order: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars,” Darwin wrote in a letter to Asa Gray.
For me it’s horrifying—but also mentally liberating, because I find the idea of a benign cosmic order deeply oppressive. We are not all inside anything, or at least nothing we’ll ever be able to fully comprehend. Order is just another name for chaos. And chaos, as the example of ichneumon wasps shows, can be a real bitch.
But I’m charmed to see there’s a serious attempt underway to get people to refer to the Ichneumonidae as Darwin wasps.
*
Walking through a Pennsylvania forest in August is a great incentive to cultivate mindfulness: one moment of inattention and you’re wiping another spiderweb off your face. I bow to the spiders; they are my true teachers. The deer flies circling my head will do for an offering.
*
The thing I admire about birding is the regular reminder to look up. The waking at 5 am and squinting at things through binoculars, not so much. But treetops are just kind of inherently trippy to stare into. I think it has something to do with the shortage of oxygen associated with craning one’s neck.