A friend sends me an email with the subject line Beauty and a photo showing a pile of rotting tomatoes, watermelon rinds and sweet-corn shuckings. “Except for a June bride, there is nothing more beautiful than an August compost pile,” he writes.
A bunch of other friends in a private listserv are having an intense discussion replete with highly personal confessions. Because I have nothing to confess, I eat half a jar of pickled jalapeño slices, which makes me sweat profusely and blow my nose five times, like summer and winter in the same jar. Afterwards, I feel wonderfully purged.
I pass the compost pile on a moonlit walk — that too-sweet smell of fermentation. A mid-sized animal goes crashing off into the weeds. We are not doing compost right; I know that. But there are just too many rewards for doing it wrong.
Watching a video shot in Manhattan after spending much of the day alone in a high mountain bog, I feel suddenly claustrophobic. People everywhere! The heat, the noise, the lack of escape — something close to panic sets my heart racing, and I start to itch all over.
Actually, it’s not quite true that I was alone. The young woman wandering through the city in the video looks alone, yes, but I spent the day in the company of ravens, crows, cedar waxwings, pileated woodpeckers, deerflies, crickets, goldfinches, catbirds, tree swallows, bluebirds, towhees and swamp sparrows. Once I heard a small group of humans pass by on foot about a quarter mile away. And somewhere off by herself my mother also picked blueberries in her own favorite spots.
This is our yearly ritual: pack a picnic lunch, drive to the blueberry bog on a beautiful, mid-week day, and pick several gallons of berries — enough for another year’s worth of blueberry muffins, pancakes, and fruit mixtures. For the first two or three hours, I am in explorer mode, striking out for the far end of the bog — which I have yet to reach — in search of the ultimate blueberry bonanza. Sometime in early to mid-afternoon, I turn around and start back — and almost invariably, find the most loaded bushes of the day.
I always tuck my pocket notebook and a camera into my pack, but rarely use either, in part because the mental space required to photograph or write is, for me, virtually incompatible with the hunting-gathering mind. I tend to pick in a dreamy, abstracted state, focusing mostly on the berries and on the bushes that need to be stripped. How they slowly straighten up after having been relieved of all that blue. The squelch of sphagnum under my feet. The few trees offering shade.
But there’s also no doubt that I write best here at home, seated in my familiar chair, staring at the monitor of my old desktop computer. This more than anything might be why I remain such a homebody, despite the fact that I enjoy seeing other places. Bear Meadows Natural Area, in Pennsylvania’s Rothrock State Forest, is one of the most unique and poetic places you’ll ever see, home to rare species, fringed by old growth, and as free of anthropogenic noise as you can get in this part of the state. The fact that I can spend half the day there and not feel inspired to jot down a single word makes me feel like a failure as a poet.
On the other hand, though, one handful of wild highbush blueberries seems about equal to one good line of verse, and today I ate many, many handfuls in addition to those that went into the bucket. As with writing, picking blueberries is as much about taking pleasure in the moment as collecting something to savor later on. And growing in such a tannin-rich tea, they are acid enough to cure almost anything, these blues.
The paperback cover of the book I’ve been reading lifts and curls back, as if unable to endure contact in this sticky heat — especially with anything as dense and woolly as poetry. It’s the season of light beer and light reading. We close up the houses in the morning and the cooler night air persists through much of the afternoon, but we can’t do anything about the humidity. I make salads for supper — rice salads, bulghur salads, pasta salads, bean salads — cooking in the morning so they have the rest of the day to marinate and chill. When I need to make bread, as I did this morning, I bake it down here so as not to heat up the kitchen at my parents’ house. If there’s a breeze at suppertime, we sit outside and try to convince ourselves it feels refreshing.
The heat seems global. Facebook friends all around the northern hemisphere have been complaining, from the Pacific Northwest to Western Europe and even Japan. I’m a bit surprised: I thought that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano’s emissions last winter were going to give us a little short-term global cooling, but apparently not.
I’ve been happily occupied in designing a website for this year’s winner of qarrtsiluni’s chapbook contest, but that won’t be unveiled for another month. If you start noticing Via Negativa undergoing major changes, you’ll know that the heat-induced blog ennui has reached a critical stage.
I was never the wise child who, hearing a patter in the leaves, tilts his open-mouthed face toward the sky. I dreamed of powerful machines with banks of dials & buttons encased in gleaming alloys, beautiful & mysterious as cathedral windows. I practiced levitation by standing on one leg — it was better than nothing. Prophesy fascinated me because of the way it made otherwise clearly random lives appear significant. I learned two different ways to hypnotize chickens. What was merely a parlor trick at first turned into a new way to make them tractable prior to execution. Adulthood came slow as a summer evening in the far north.
1) You seem to have an intense curiosity of the natural world. How did that curiosity come about?
I was raised on a remote mountaintop farm without television or neighbors. Everyone else in my family was a nature nerd, and I resisted as long as I could, refusing to learn the birds and so forth, but in the end I succumbed, in part because of my interest in poetry (which also began at an early age). You simply can’t write about something unless you know its name. And once you know the name, curiosity takes over and you have to learn more.
2) What would you change about your home, your neighbourhood, your corner of the world? What one thing would you change to make it a better place?
Reintroduce cougars.
3) Describe your most profound encounter in the natural world.
The one I had at dusk two hours ago, listening to two thrushes sing from opposite sides of the yard. That was it for today, at any rate.
I don’t know. I might not use the word “profound” for many if not most direct encounters with charasmatic critters. This photo my Dad took of me chattering my teeth at a porcupine back in the late 90s was the main image on my Geocities website for five years:
Though I jokingly refer to the porcupine as one of my totem animals — I share its big teeth, love of trees, preference for dark, cave-like places and penchant for solitude, not to mention at times its prickliness — I don’t regard it as a spirit guide in any meaningful way. I don’t go in for that fake-ass neo-shamanism bullshit.
I am much more interested in trying to relate to animals as persons than as avatars from some spirit world in which I don’t believe. Yes, I’ve had my share of spooky crepuscular encounters with creatures such as gray foxes, screech owls, and coyotes, but it’s the little observations in broad daylight that have given me I think my most durable impressions of non-human nature. For example, when I think of black bears, I think of digging, snuffling, log-ripping, birdsong-listening, mostly amiable, shy folks you’d have a hard time pissing off (and god help you if you did). Come to think of it, on a single morning in June 2009, I had both a spooky dawn encounter and an amusing, broad-daylight encounter with what I presume was the very same bear.
4) If you could have a conversation with any person in history who would it be, and why that person?
I’d like to talk to Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), the Chinese philosopher from the late Warring States period, describe our own chaotic period and all the profound environmental challenges we face, and ask him what kind of wei wu wei could possibly make a difference now. Also, I’d just like to get drunk with him.
5) What advice would you give to anyone wanting to better experience the natural world?
Learn to find, gather, and prepare some wild foods.
Hi Mom! I got you a poetry book again this year: The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt, a major contemporary American poet’s first book. I wasn’t really familiar with her work, except by reputation and a few poems in anthologies, until I happened to pick this up at Webster’s the other month, but when I saw it had an epigraph by Gerard Manley Hopkins (“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”), I had a strong feeling it might be your kind of book — and mine too. I stood in the bookstore opening it at random, and each time I found myself saying, “Yup, Mom would like this!”
It’s not just the fact that Clampitt’s subjects are often taken from the natural world, but the way she writes about them — a poem about an orchid, for instance, ends with her crouching down to sniff it, just as you would do — and the philosophical ends they serve. I couldn’t help thinking of some of your own favorite themes, in your writing and in dinner-table conversations, when I read a poem about Good Friday that makes room for Serengeti lions and Charles Darwin, another poem that references the myth of Prometheus to critique our addiction to petroleum (and before that, whale oil), and a poem called “The Quarry,” which contains lines like these:
Think back
a little, to what would have been
without this festering of lights at night,
this grid of homesteads, this hardening
lymph of haste foreshortened into highways…
– which made me think of our own local quarry, so often drowning out the bird calls with its grinding and roaring to feed our supposed need for ever new highways.
I was impressed by the notes Clampitt included at the back of her book, so much more helpful than what poets usually include, afraid perhaps that going into too much detail will make readers think their poems can’t stand on their own. It’s a legitimate fear, though: how much commentary is the average reader willing to endure to understand a poem? I do worry quite a bit about the fate of poetry, mine and others’, that assumes a basic familiarity with natural history, astronomy, the Bible, Greek mythology, and other elements of what used to be considered a complete education. Perhaps I need to update my informal guideline for whether or not to include a note to a poem, which has always been: “Would Mom get this without having to look it up?”
Though still in mint condition, the book is aging, I’m afraid. It was printed in 1983, the year I graduated from high school — which believe it or not was 27 freakin’ years ago! — and the spine made an ominous complaining noise at one point when I opened the pages too far, so do be careful. I think you’ll find it a fitting companion for your books by Mary Oliver, Louise Bogan, May Swenson, and all the others I’ve given you for Mother’s Day over the years. It’s not an unbroken tradition — some years I have given you other things, haven’t I? — but you always seem to appreciate getting poetry books, as witnessed by the fact that you almost always read them right away, and of course I enjoy giving them. And if I can say this without getting too maudlin here, it makes me think how goddamn lucky I am to have a mother who not only reads my own stuff, but also reads and enjoys poetry in general. In my years of blogging and getting to know other online writers, I’ve come to realize just how rare that is. Many if not most of my blogging friends say their parents don’t really get what they’re doing, and some even have to use pseudonyms or avoid using their last names just to make sure their parents never find out that they’re blogging.
You and Dad, by contrast, have been my most regular and supportive readers since Day 1, and I can’t thank you enough for that. We’re not a very demonstrative family, so this is as awkward for me to write as it I suppose it is embarrassing for you to read, but I wanted to say it in public because who knows if and when I’ll ever publish that full-length collection of poems that I can dedicate to you guys. Thanks not only for the support but for the conversation, the friendship, and the inspiration of your example. Anyone who’s ever read your work has probably sensed how conscientious you are about getting the facts straight, and I think — I hope — that’s influenced me, especially given how prone we Bonta males are to B.S. and bontification, as you call it. In my new series of bestiary poems, for instance, I’m trying to make sure that no assertion, however imaginative, departs too far from what scientists think they know about the species in question.
What scientists think they know. It occurs to me that even my basic apophatic stance, as reflected in the title of this blog, is partly due to your influence: decades of hearing you marvel at, or sometimes rant about, just how little we know about even our most common fellow denizens of the planet, how much basic taxonomy still needs to be done, to say nothing of studies on behavior, life history, ecological relationships and ecosystem functioning… you’ve made me realize how sadly inappropriate our species name sapiens truly is. But
the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.
There’s a lot we have still to unlearn, Clampitt seems to be saying, and the resulting vertigo can be delightful. I hope you’ll find her language and perspectives, her blending of the erudite and the down-to-earth, as rewarding as I do. Happy Mother’s Day.
Spring is definitely underway now, even as Old Man Winter is still shuffling slowly toward the exit. I heard tundra swans almost as soon as I went out on the porch this morning, and when the swans stopped flying over around mid-morning, it was time for the “V”s of migrant Canada geese. I even saw a lone seagull.
I walked around the field, checking out the networks of vole burrows emerging from the melting snowpack. Down by the barn, the bluebirds were inspecting a battered old nesting box, and a few hours later, the first song sparrow returned. This was actually the first year in a couple of decades that song sparrows didn’t over-winter, and the mornings have seemed unnaturally silent as a result.
When the temperature hit 60 degrees this afternoon, I felt a sudden compulsion to cut my hair. It had been a year and a half since my last self-administered haircut. It’s nice to be able to do it outside, without a shirt on, leaning over the porch rail.
I documented the results mainly with Facebook in mind, but since I don’t feel up to a real blog post tonight, I thought I might as well inflict it on y’all, too. (Yes, I wear deeply unfashionable glasses and clothes from Wal-Mart.) I was somewhat repulsed by the emergence of my bare scalp from underneath all that graying hair. There were some blood spots and other unsightly blotches of the sort that I tend to identify with — you know — old people. It looked raw, like a patch of ground just liberated from the snow.
A wonderful conversation between two environmental activists. I love that Pete gets the whole film crew singing along at the end. Good ol’ Pete. The only wince-worthy moment for me was when Pete repeated the tired and ubiquitous quote from Margaret Mead about a small number of thoughtful, committed people making a difference.
Here’s an interesting fact about that quote, though: my dad is actually the one who originally discovered it and put it into circulation. Back in the late 80s, my parents were very active in our local Audubon chapter, heading up an International Issues Committee to bring attention to the destruction of the rainforests in the global South. I am not sure how much credit we can take for bringing that issue into the mainstream consciousness, but National Audubon leaders took a great interest in the committee and sought to replicate it in other chapters. We collected second-hand binoculars to send to environmentalists in Central America, Peru and the Philippines, among various and sundry other good deeds, and we prepared educational materials to share with schools and civic groups around here: slideshows, exhibits, pamphlets and the like.
It was in one of those pamphlets that Dad first deployed the now-famous quote. He had been reading a great deal of classic anthropological works at the time, including the works of Margaret Mead. The trouble is that he quite uncharacteristically (for a reference librarian) failed to include a proper citation for the quote — and no amount of searching since has ever turned it up. Which Mead book is it from? He says he says no idea. And really, we only have his word for it that he didn’t just make the quote up himself. In any event, someone at National Audubon liked it well enough to put it in their own propaganda, and it took off from there, spreading like a contagion through environmentalist and activist circles. Small groups of citizens, thoughtful and committed or otherwise, have been using it to bolster their self-esteem ever since.
My sledding video from last winter was such a success, I thought I’d try it again this year. The conditions were pretty icy and scary last winter, so I stopped at the half-way point, not wanting to risk the video camera any farther. (I hold it in my right hand as I ride — this isn’t a helmet cam.) But this winter, given all the wonderful cold weather and regular snow, sledding conditions have been exceptional, and with the January thaw imminent, yesterday afternoon I went ahead and shot this video of a sled ride clear to the bottom, a mile-and-a-half-long run. It isn’t quite non-stop, as you’ll see: there are two places, slight uphills on the way down, where I had to get out and walk for a few yards. (The first is the half-way spot where I stopped in last winter’s video.)
Since I was on hard-packed snow rather than ice this time, the ride was relatively quiet. It’s the quiet that I love about sledding, as much as the speed, so I decided to dispense with rousing music on the soundtrack and go for straight realism. (Actually, a little less realism might’ve been nice, but unfortunately my camera doesn’t have image stabilization. I also apologize for all the sniffing — but that too is the sound of winter, isn’t it?)
I’ve been sledding for a long time — since at least the age of four, I think. My mother remembers watching me sled the hill below our farmhouse in Maine, trudging up and flying down over and over at zero degrees Fahrenheit. We moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971, when I was five. We did a lot of sledding as a family in the early 70s; my mother’s back still permitted her to go down a gentle slope sitting up. I remember sledding by moonlight, the five of us, taking turns on a shifting assortment of runner sleds and wooden toboggans, our whoops strangely not out of place in the silvered landscape. We never had anything plastic, nor even an aluminum saucer. We were arch traditionalists.
Winters were serious business back then, boys and girls. I remember our first brown Christmas, sometime in the late 70s, because it was such an exception. This winter so far has been like a trip into a time-machine (and given the option of going anywhere back in time, how many of us from happy families wouldn’t choose our own childhoods over the most stirring periods of human history?). January was always the best month for sledding because it was the coldest.
February, by contrast, was always the serious snow month, which brought its own excitement — snow forts, long walks on snowshoes — but it also meant we had to do a lot of tromping in order to keep the sled runs open. Dad showed us how to shuffle slowly along in a straight line, making several passes. But I don’t think anyone else had the patience for it but him and me, and after a few years it was all me. I was an inveterate day-dreamer, so it didn’t much matter what I was doing — I was always somewhere else, deep in a story. And you know, maybe that explains the attraction of sledding to someone like me, who never got into sports otherwise: going down a hill on a sled is one time I am fully alive to the present and nothing else.
After Mom’s back got too bad to permit any more sledding, Dad stopped too, and from the mid-70s on, his main contribution was to mow a sledding trail through the field with his tractor and brushhog each fall. Oddly enough, we didn’t otherwise keep walking trails through the fields mowed back them. We were still raising chickens and ducks and cutting hay, so I guess we viewed them more as hayfields than meadows for wildlife watching. We didn’t, for example, have the trail down through what we call the amphitheatre, where I start my sled ride in the video. The sledding trail Dad mowed every year went straight down from the upper edge of the field opposite the barn. We’d sometimes shovel snow into a bump at the bottom to make group toboggan rides more exciting: airborne!
It’s funny the way people look at me now, as an almost 44-year-old man, when I mention I like to go sledding. As I noted in last year’s post, even though lots of adults enjoy skiing and snowboarding, somehow sledding is for children. But is it? About a week before Christmas, I was joined by a couple of kids — my four-year-old niece Elanor and an older boy of around nine, I think, and the boy’s father, who’s my age, joined in as well. We had a blast sledding and tobogganing down through the field. But I couldn’t help noticing that both children seemed to regard the walk back up the hill as something onerous. Well, to be fair, their legs were a lot shorter than mine, but on the other hand, they were in way better shape than me. The walk up the hill is how you build up the warmth that makes the ride down tolerable, I told them, but they weren’t buying it. So maybe you have to be a grown-up to truly appreciate sledding.
One of the other things besides sledding that signals my permanent adolescence to most people, of course, is the fact that I don’t own a car and barely know how to drive. I am not a big fan of the internal combustion engine. But I’m not sure I’d enjoy sledding nearly as much if I weren’t so accustomed, as we all are, to the contrasting experience of riding in a car. It makes sledding feel like a magic carpet ride.
It helps that these days I invariably sled in a sitting position, which is a bit slower than lying down because of the way the weight’s distributed — the runners tend to bite in toward the back and it can slow forward momentum considerably, depending on the conditions. But it feels faster and more dangerous, especially the sharp turns when you risk tipping over. About ten years ago I started to notice dangerous twinges in my lower back whenever I went over a bump while sledding prone, so much as loved sledding that way I was forced to switch. Our neighbor Paula threw her back out a couple weeks ago while sledding with her grandchildren in front of their house (the third residence in Plummer’s Hollow). And she’s just a year older than me.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s the real reason most adults prefer to leave sledding to the kids. But I hear there are an increasing number of publicly designated sledding hills, for example in Pennsylvania state parks, and given the tendencies of people in my generation to try and prolong childhood indefinitely if possible, I suspect I might even be part of a trend. But even if all the downhill skiers decide to switch tomorrow, forgo their lazy-ass ski lifts, and take up something truly physically demanding, I think I’ll still stick to the quiet and solitude of a Plummer’s Hollow sled ride.
Be careful what you wish for. We had a white Christmas, all right — especially after it started to sleet and the clouds settled in. It couldn’t have gotten any whiter, or any drearier.
Late in the morning, I took the camera on a short walk across the field to check up on the American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens), of which we have just a couple vines on the property. I’ll admit I have collected a few sprigs for Christmas wreaths in past years, but since we have so little of it, I stopped. Collecting by camera will have to suffice.
Unlike the more familiar East Asian species Celastrus orbiculatus, which is invasive in some areas, American bittersweet is in decline throughout its range due to over-collecting and, I suspect, over-browsing by deer. In almost 40 years, we’ve never found a new vine on the property. Up until 15 years ago there was a vine at the Far Field, too, but when its host trees fell over, that was the end of it. The two vines I visited today used to have a third companion, as well.
As a symbol of Christmas, bittersweet seems aptly named, at least as far as my own feelings about the holiday are concerned. For the first couple decades of my life, it was the unchallenged climax of the year, but now, I don’t know — I guess I prefer the smaller but more regular pleasures of daily life, and I no longer feel such an overwhelming urge to acquire new things. Christmas used to be all about the presents, but now seems significant mainly as a celebration of the slow return of light to the northern hemisphere; today’s gloomy weather simply made the holiday cheer more essential.
And of course I love that we get to bring a tree inside (though according to rigid family custom, that can’t happen until Christmas Eve) and decorate it with lights and a couple hundred ornaments, each with its own story. We have hand-painted Christmas balls that once belonged to my mother’s grandmother, and a couple of blown-egg Santa Clauses that my parents made in the first years of their marriage, before we were born. Originally there were a full dozen, each slightly different depending on the exact arrangement of glued felt pieces and cotton balls, but they, like the bittersweet, have suffered a gradual attrition. Mom still exclaims about how much work it was to empty all those eggs: “Never again!”
This year, my niece Elanor was old enough to help rather than hinder the tree-decorating process, which accounts for the unusual concentration of angels at about the two-foot line. She likes angels. And her Nanna told her something about each ornament they hung: “That’s a God’s-eye your Uncle Dave made when he was a boy. And here’s Santa Claus in the bathtub — isn’t he funny? A friend of ours gave this to us years and years ago.”
I was impressed by the extent to which the presence of a 4-and-a-half-year-old child could put the magic back in the holiday for me. She was very good about taking turns opening presents this morning, but was so excited by her own presents, at one point she actually started weeping for joy. She ran over and hugged her daddy after every present from him. And when everything had finally been opened, we discovered one present that nobody could remember giving. The odd thing was that her grandfather had been sitting on the floor with her the whole time reading the labels and making sure all the presents went to the proper recipients.
So a cheap plastic knick-knack suddenly acquired an aura of wonder, and I had a dim recollection of being five and taking it on faith that half my presents had been delivered in the middle of the night by a fat guy in a flying sleigh. Hey, it’s no weirder than the whole incarnation and virgin birth thing, right? Winter is, above all, a time for telling stories. Here’s wishing all my friends and readers an abundance of wonder this holiday season and in the year to come.
I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Metaphors for the Moon
Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.
Cleaning My Attic
Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...
Clumps and Voids
The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
botanizing
On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.
The Twitching Line
My uncle, gutting a fish:
removing the fins from either side,
tipping the knife below
the little anus, pointing the tail-
end away, slitting it to the gills,
then plunging in a hand
to scoop the organs out, soft
and scarlet as a litter of kittens.
The Ordinary and the Wild
I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.
Busily Seeking... Continual Change
So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.
Chatoyance
And on the other side, what I
set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
a crease scored in bent blades of grass
where I forgot the wall stood,
my footsteps blurring as the
grass unbends.
Velveteen Rabbi
There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.
Will Buckingham
My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
