Imagine being plankton:
small & adrift, little more
than head & rudder & a single eye,
food for whales.
Then one day the barnacle larva
grows a two-piece carapace
& is consumed by a sudden
sense of purpose.
Now it has working legs
& the power to swim wherever
it wants, but what it wants
is to find a spot where
it will never have to swim again.
Acutely sensitive feelers sample
every hard surface for evidence
of others of its kind, & in so doing,
deposit the same sign.
It tries out each potential anchorage
by standing on its head,
& if satisfied, secretes
from the base of its antennae
one of the hardest cements
known to science. Imagine
making that kind of commitment.
But only now,
attatched by the forehead
to rock or reef or oil tanker hull,
can it embark upon the final stage
of metamorphosis, become an adult
& build its ridged turret.
Two years later, packed among
its companions-for-life,
it reaches sexual maturity.
Though lacking a heart, it wields
in proportion to body size
the world’s largest penis,
which is also disposable
& re-grows every winter for
a new orgy. They enter each other
with the sureness of blind fingers
reading Braille, opercula open,
able to accommodate
as many as six at a time.
The mating season over,
each broods a clutch of fertilized eggs
within its shell until they hatch
& for a little while thereafter,
giving what we can only call live birth.
And all the while, the feathery appendages
that sprouted where legs used to be
keep up a delicate stroking
of the ocean current —
the barnacle’s first & probably
greatest love, inescapable,
full of the taste of distance
& the savory plankton.
(Thanks to Creature Cast for the inspiration)
This entry is part 18 of 18 in the series Banjo Poems
The silent banjo leans against the wall
like a movie gangster, casual, coiled,
ready for some chin music.
The silent banjo may or may not
be in tune — & in what tuning, who knows?
To some, this makes it alluring.
Its neck curves like a mute swan’s,
all question mark.
The silent banjo is silent because
it has seen too much.
The silent banjo is silent because
no one remembers how to listen.
Approach the silent banjo as you would
any other apocryphon:
brandishing the one true book of matches
& saying in your best Hollywood voice,
The jig is up.
The urchin uses its spines as feet; for it rests its weight on these, and then moving shifts from place to place.
Aristotle, The History of Animals
Spines have more uses
than one would think.
Sure, they defend against sea otters
and the voracious stars.
Ball-jointed, they swivel to catch
pieces of floating algae
for the shorter, two-
fingered pedicellines to convey
to the bottom-scraping mouth
& its five sharp pyramids.
They are digging bars.
A purple urchin can excavate
a hollow into solid rock.
If it starts too young, it may become stuck,
entombed. Some never dig at all,
& wander slow as time
through the kelp forest.
The spines sharpen a kind of vision, too,
like squinting eyelids
bringing into focus
the images collected by the pedicellines
& the tube feet, which are furred
with light-sensitive molecules.
The more numerous a sea urchin’s spines,
the sharper its vision — & yet
it has no brain.
It is all brain.
And it lacks eyes because it is all eye,
revolving in its self-made socket
for as long as a century,
risking death from the removal
of a single spine,
unable ever to shut.
Part videopoem, part music video. The music is by the Polish composer efiel on Jamendo.com, who made it available for noncommercial remix with attribution under the same Creative Commons licence, so this whole video is also so licenced (BY-NC-SA). This is the acoustic version of his otherwise electronic single, Home, with the first instrumental break repeated twice to give me time to get the reading in. The singer (as we learn in the notes for his album 2, which is also available on Last.fm) is Joanna Szwej. The creatures in the video are the Asian or harlequin ladybird beetle, Harmonia axyridis, filmed swarming one of the windows in my house yesterday afternoon. Here’s the poem.
Harlequin Ladybird
The ladybird
is a hard pill,
a dose of red medicine.
Her dogged way
of walking &
the gleam on
her elytra suggest
a certain brittleness,
a gift for sudden
flights of rage.
You wouldn’t think
such a small mouth
could pack
such a painful bite.
Like everyone,
I found her cute
at first, until I realized
there were many more
versions of her, &
they had infiltrated
every crack. Now
she lets herself in
whenever she wants,
only to spend all
her time at
the window.
The pungent scent
of her defensive spray
permeates the house.
What is she afraid of?
I begin to suspect
that those delicate
underwings are really
an airmail letter
containing the last,
unwary words of someone
who perished in
a house fire, the way
she keeps unfolding
& refolding them —
two sheets of onionskin
tucked against a small,
bad heart.
This entry is part 17 of 18 in the series Banjo Poems
Fill a soup spoon with salt
& lower it into the Atlantic
singing: Dance, sailor,
dance with your captain,
your head’s too heavy,
your body’s too thin.
When the salt is gone
say in a loud voice:
Are you thirsty now?
& wait for a gull to say Yes.
Walk backwards so
the incoming tide can’t follow
your footsteps home.
Repeat daily.
If symptoms persist,
see a licensed magician.
“Gacela” means “ghazal,” but I decided to keep the Spanish word this time to avoid confusion, since Lorca’s notion of what constitutes a ghazal differs so much from the practice of contemporary English-language poets (to say nothing of Arabic poets). This was part of Lorca’s 23-poem cycle Divan del Tamarit, an homage to the great Moorish civilization of his native Andalusia.
Lorca’s free adaptations of the ghazal and qasida reflected the influence of the anthology Poemas Arábigoandaluces translated by Emilio García Gómez, which created a minor sensation among Spanish readers and intellectuals when it was published in 1930. Poets of the renowned Generation of 27, which included Lorca, found it especially revelatory. Rafael Albertí later told an interviewer, “That book opened our eyes to all that Andalusian past, and brought it so close to us that it left me with a great preoccupation for those writers, those Andalusian writers, Arabs and Jews, born in Spain… If one studies Arab-Andalusian poetry carefully, so full of metaphors and miniaturism, we will see that there is a continuity with the later poetry, of Góngora, Soto de Rojas, and centuries later, with our own.” (I’m quoting from the introduction to an English translation of the anthology, Poems of Arab Andalusia, by Cola Franzen.)
The music, as noted in the credits, is by Antony Raijekov. It’s from his Jamendo.com collection Jazz U, to which he applied a liberal Creative Commons license that allows for remixes.
“Gacela” means “ghazal,” but I decided to keep the Spanish word this time to avoid confusion, since Lorca’s notion of what constitutes a ghazal differs so much from the practice of contemporary English-language poets (to say nothing of Arabic poets). This was part of Lorca’s 23-poem cycle Divan del Tamarit, an homage to the great Moorish civilization of his native Andalusia.
Lorca’s free adaptations of the ghazal and qasida reflected the influence of the anthology Poemas Arábigoandaluces translated by Emilio García Gómez, which created a minor sensation among Spanish readers and intellectuals when it was published in 1930. Poets of the renowned Generation of 27, which included Lorca, found it especially revelatory. Rafael Albertí later told an interviewer, “That book opened our eyes to all that Andalusian past, and brought it so close to us that it left me with a great preoccupation for those writers, those Andalusian writers, Arabs and Jews, born in Spain… If one studies Arab-Andalusian poetry carefully, so full of metaphors and miniaturism, we will see that there is a continuity with the later poetry, of Góngora, Soto de Rojas, and centuries later, with our own.” (I’m quoting from the introduction to an English translation of the anthology, Poems of Arab Andalusia, by Cola Franzen.)
The music, as noted in the credits, is by Antony Raijekov. It’s from his Jamendo.com collection Jazz U, to which he applied a liberal Creative Commons license that allows for remixes.
The glass frog
is a master magician:
he bares not only his heart
but his digestive tract, too,
puts his guts on display
without spilling them,
as luminous & orderly
as a Joseph Cornell box.
His call is pure crystal,
& he can produce
a full chorus
from his single throat.
Day & night he squats
by his clutch of eggs,
darting the parasitic flies
before they can inject
their own dangerous eggs,
as the tadpoles grow visible
through the clearing albumen.
One night they wriggle free,
slide off their natal leaf
& drop into the jungle stream
far below, there to burrow
into the sandy bed.
Living in a cloud forest,
is it ever possible
to stop dreaming?
Trees bloom in lurid colors
that are not their own
& anything that wants to hide
can simply sit still
& learn how to be transparent
from gas & fog.
The snow flea is rarely found alone.
Though if it were, who but another snow flea
would notice it against the snow,
a single speck of pepper, a mote of ash?
Come March & they move en masse,
transhumant across their blue-shadowed host.
Approach too close & they start to rocket about
like acrobats in a mad flea circus.
There’s safety in numbers, & in
the unpredictability of a random launch —
the wingless springtail’s main defense.
True, one sometimes goes straight up
& returns to the same, dangerous spot,
but what bird wants to mess with such
unquiet seeds?
The snow flea is as self-reliant
as its cousin the true flea is dependent.
It absorbs moisture through
a feeding tube in its abdomen
& breathes directly through its thick skin.
Its blood contains a protein
that prevents it from ever freezing
& hardening into knives.
The snow flea never stops molting, even
after becoming an adult.
Life alternates between two phases,
mating & eating, with a complete
change of skin after each.
Nor does the fastidiousness end there:
all reproduction is by post.
The male deposits a tidy packet of sperm
at some convenient location
& the female stops by later & picks it up.
To everything its season.
And when the snow melts?
The snow flea walks on water if it must,
& returns at last — recalcitrant seasoning —
to the soil’s dark goulash.
This is a complete re-working of a poem that first appeared here back in December 2008, “Like a Snow Flea.” For more on snow fleas and springtails generally, see Bug Girl’s Blog and especially the Marvelous in nature.
I made this thinking I might post it on Moving Poems, but I’m not sure it quite qualifies as “the best video poetry on the web.” Nevertheless, I enjoy matching poems to footage like this, and I happen to think it’s a pretty good fit, assuming I’m correct in reading a fairly light-hearted tone into the poem.
I wholeheartedly concur with the sentiment that “the world is different from what it seems to be / and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.” The closing assertion, that poems should only be written rarely and reluctantly, strikes me as a rather strong prescription: potentially life-saving for some poets and very dangerous for others. I do love the next-to-last stanza, though (in the canonical translation):
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
This entry is part 14 of 18 in the series Banjo Poems
Our only god the clock
has the face of a banjo
& three efficient fingers.
On the weekends we get
behind its wheel & go.
Drunk & loud, you want
everything to clatter apart
at once: breakdown! But
we’re out of the mountains,
so it’s full speed ahead,
boys — rewind & play.
When Earl says the word,
the snow will return to the sky.
This entry is part 13 of 18 in the series Banjo Poems
The banjo knows
what it’s like to be sky,
how high pressure produces
the clearest light.
I read about a woman
without a vaginal opening
who still conceived
& gave birth through a Caesarian.
This is more or less
how a banjo makes music,
isn’t it? They said
a jealous ex-lover had stabbed her
in the abdomen, permitting
his rival’s semen,
which she had taken orally,
to find & fertilize
her unsuspected egg.
Maybe this is
an urban legend but
it sounds like something
that ought to happen
in a world with banjos in it.
Who needs roots?
The medicine show barker
prescribes the same
white pill for everything,
a round
& chewable eraser.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"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.
Smorgasblog
Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
----
Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
----
Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
----
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----
Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
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