Category Archives: Riffs

Streams of consciousness, automatic writing, running at the mouth, and/or beatings of dead horses.

The truth about trees

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

gloomy beech

Some trees are agoraphobic — it’s true. With every branch and twig they strain to block out the sky, and they never leave the forest. Winter is painful for them, but they escape as best they can by drawing down their sap and hiding underground. On warm days in late winter and early spring, when their sap starts to flow again, they are groggy as sleepwalkers that have just fallen down the stairs.

black birch

Waking up isn’t always a pleasant thing, especially if you are approaching middle age and your joints creak, your skin is suddenly no longer elastic, and any weird lump or lesion could be the beginning of something dire.

black birch with polyphores

Better to stay asleep and dream of sprouting a thousand parasols or hiding like a bird beneath its feathers. Better just to stand by the stream and listen to the water, which has mastered the art of running from the sky.

Posted in Greatest Hits, Photos, Riffs, Trees | 19 Comments

High-rent times (2010 quote-o-rama)

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Hide your kids, hide your wife & hide your husband, ’cause they rapin’ everybody out here. The rent is too damn high. They got together & swore a pact with the devil. This is a big fuckin’ deal! To the passenger who just called me a motherfucker: fuck you. The rent is too damn high. You touch my junk & I’m going to have you arrested. The gentleman is correct in sitting down. I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies — the rent is too damn high. I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you. Just avoid holding it that way. You know, I’d like my life back — the rent is too damn high. Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line & not cross it. I was a big supporter of waterboarding. It’s a double rainbow all the way! America today begins to turn back to God. Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate. In the Ground Zero Mosque of the soul, dude, you have no Quran, because the rent is too damn high.

Posted in Personal/Political, Riffs | 10 Comments

The Truth About Potemkin

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Everything I thought I knew about Potemkin, godfather of the public relations industry, turns out to be false. His villages were real, however new and fancied up — nothing like the “village squares” in 21st-century America, which spring up near highway exits and have no residents at all. The peasants posing with their herds weren’t rushed in for the empress’s visit, but had been there for at least four years. And he himself was no empty suit. He wouldn’t have had any motivation to deceive the empress; they were confidantes and former lovers who knew each other’s secrets. When he wanted to impress her, he arranged to set off 20,000 rockets, or spelled out her name on a mountainside with pots of burning oil. His ideas were often grandiose, and his greatest colonization scheme ran out of funds and had to be abandoned when it was less than half complete. Toward the end of his life, he announced plans to conquer Turkey, Poland, and Egypt. He contracted a fever, ate a whole goose, and died on the open steppe.

Posted in Personal/Political, Riffs | Comments Off

Confession of the Professional Left

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Having made a career of desertion, we are adept at wailing, failing, falling, walking it off. We juggle buckets & flamethrowers, weed-whackers & metronomes, equal to whatever sinister task. Every third Thursday we serve guilt & sour soup. Mornings leave a gritty residue in our communal sink — think of a hog wallow. If the earth were any closer, we would have to put millipedes on the payroll & rechristen all the cemeteries as recycling centers, because what you call leftovers, we call encore presentations. We believe our enemies to be human, no more evil than we, & we believe in regular upheaval. Like sands in a goddamn hourglass are the lives of our days.

(In response to the recent outburst from President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs.)

Posted in Personal/Political, Riffs | Comments Off

Irises

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Dave Bonta

I have yellow irises, I have purple irises, and starting about four years ago, I even have mixed-race yellow-and-purple irises that appeared all on their own. These last are very cool, despite the fact that they are kind of ugly: yellow and purple really don’t mix. Actually, I came perilously close to painting my living room purple two years ago, and it was only the thought of the contrast it would make with the yellow of my writing room that dissuaded me.

I’ve never regretted painting this room yellow: it’s a cheerful color that seems particularly fitting in a 19th-century cottage, for some reason. There are certain bars I visit in my dreams with yellow décor, and they are also always appealing empty — no noisy drunks, not even a bartender. You just pour a yellow drink into a glass and savor the warmth in your throat, like liquid sunshine. Maybe this is what an iris is like to a bumblebee: a self-serve bar with bright translucent walls. And when irises close, I love the way they fold up tight as six-fingered fists. It’s as if the garden is mounting an insurrection against the sun.

Posted in Plummer's Hollow, Riffs | 17 Comments

Sandman

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Dave Bonta

I am a renter on a large estate. Every night the landlord comes around to take his cut. If I shut the door, he raps on the window. If I pull the shades, he turns my power off. It’s not my labor he’s after but my consciousness. I only need it for a few hours, he says, but already I’ve given up a third of my life. Think of it as ballast, he says, the dark sand trickling through his fingers. Imagine being unable to imagine. Imagine weeping because you couldn’t spare the time to blink.

Posted in Riffs | 1 Comment

Opposite of erasure

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Dave Bonta

In response to Siona.

I want to steal some place for recovery, some chaotic site not for self-indulgent accumulation, but filling in and anchoring and letting happen and growing wild, or for negating identity, and laughter.

If I were an engineer I would be an engineer of excess only, of crowded markets and teeming pools; if I were a real estate agent I would sell land only to preserve it, to allow it to achieve maximal complexity on its own; if I were a critic I would praise movies that were not just action-packed but nonsensical; if I were the wind I would howl. My body feels too empty already, and yet no one seems to be avoiding the by-products of less familiarity, less attention, and less.

I seek instead what I already have. I could clumsily recover, or be recovered — what a pain in the ass that would be. Anything can be done, anything, and this is wonderful and repellent and oh, thank Lucifer, a fiction.

Posted in Philosophy/Religion, Riffs | 3 Comments

Milkwort

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

polygala pair

The gray squirrel stands in the middle of the driveway, apparently spellbound by the spectacle of two tom turkeys gobbling and displaying for a small flock of hens. I stand fifty feet away, thinking, it’s not everyday you get to watch wildlife watching wildlife.

beech leaves

Last dream before waking: I wield a blowgun in the middle of a target-rich environment. I fire at a small figure. I thought it was small because it was far away, but it turns out to be right beside me. The dart thunks into it, a steel wedge into the top of a log. I pry the log open and there’s a person inside — someone’s missing child, I’m told. Except she’s made of luck and spunk wood and her face is a crudely carved piece of banana. Large beetles start to emerge from her body cavity. I brush them off, and she breaks in half. You killed her! I start to panic, wondering how she ever managed to live in the first place with such a perishable face.

I wake and shower and have an unusually productive day.

Posted in Dreams, Memoir, Photos, Riffs, Wildflowers | 7 Comments

Perigee

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Dave Bonta

moonrise 2

A book printed inside a book: halfway through, there’s the title page again, and the table of contents and the rest of it. You think, I’ve just read this, but you find yourself reading it again anyway, anxious to find out what will happen when you get to the middle. What happens is that suddenly you are back into unexplored territory, and you feel both lost and relieved. You get to the last page, and look: the outer book resumes where it left off, halfway through.

You set it aside. Does the cicada climb back into its shell? The book within the book has already crawled out and is waiting for its wings to dry.

moonrise 1

In your spam folder, one of the messages purporting to originate at your own address reads: Hey, why do not you write? You forgot about me? Outside, the moon is at perigee — the closest it gets to earth all year. Perhaps that accounts for the numbing cold.

You fumble with the camera settings, shorten one of the tripod legs so the camera can stand on the slope, and peer through the LCD screen. The moon is the very same color as the lamp on your desk. Tonight it has a companion, too: Mars is just a hand’s-breadth away. You try to picture yourself as a red planet.

Posted in Photos, Riffs | 9 Comments

The internet must die

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Dave Bonta

That haunting snippet of music you kept hearing on NPR, between stories on “All Things Considered”? Thanks to npr.org and the internet generally, you were able to track it down within minutes and listen to the whole song for free, because someone had thoughtfully uploaded it to YouTube. But alas, aside from that snippet, the song had nothing to offer, and it kept offering it for more than five minutes over progressively more synthetic beats. You try listening to a couple other pieces by the same band, and they’re so horrible you can’t get past the first minute. You’re reminded of a woman you glimpsed once in a side-street for several seconds, and how she haunted your imagination for years thereafter. What does the imagination know? Just enough to be dangerous. But the internet — the internet knows too much.

Posted in Humor, Riffs | 8 Comments
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