Saved by a banjo, she turned
into someone forever glancing
in the rear-view mirror,
someone given to sudden,
unpredictable attacks of laughter.
The amount of space
her arms now claimed with
their emphatic gesticulations
alarmed even herself:
how unladylike!
She stopped smoking & enrolled
in truck-driving school
because, she said, she didn’t
ever want to slow down.
She’d pull into rest areas
on the high plains & listen
to the non-stop wind.
How can we live without the unknown before us? —Rene Char
Luck
Perigee
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.
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.
Winter trees in a flood
Steady rain turned into a downpour early Sunday evening and didn’t let up for another fifteen hours. And just like that, we had a flood. In the same way that you get flash floods after hard rains in the dry West, here in the winter when the ground is frozen hard and the trees are leafless and dormant, there’s little to keep the water from running into the nearest ravine. We lost hundreds of dollars worth of quarry stone from the Plummer’s Hollow Road in just a few hours.
It would take a solid week of hard rain to get this kind of flood on a forested landscape in the summer. If these rare winter floods serve any purpose, it may be to remind us what would happen — what has happened here in the past — in the absence of forests: every hard rain turns into a flood.
At the bottom of the hollow, the Little Juniata River wasn’t so little anymore. It roared just a couple feet below the deck of our access bridge, which shook as floating logs and tires thudded against the pier. The riverbanks became instant swamps.
Nor was the flooding restricted to low places; the ephemeral ponds at the very top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed grew and merged briefly into one big pond. Then the temperature dropped and everything froze.
By the time I got up there to take pictures yesterday afternoon, the water level had fallen by half a foot, leaving a sagging ice ceiling with little underneath it and nothing but scattered tree trunks to hold it up — an ephemeral architecture, like some boom town gone bust.
***
Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival. The deadline for the next edition, at the UK-based treeblog, is January 30 — see the call for submissions for details on how to submit.
Also, be sure not to miss the interview with Pablo, Jade and me at the Nature Blog Network. We talk all about the Festival of the Trees: how it got started, why we do it, how it’s not really some kind of freaky tree cult, and why you should join us.
Housekeeping note
Apologies to anyone who tried to visit Via Negativa or one of its six sister sites last night and saw only a page that read THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED. Believe me, I was as confused as you were! This morning, I learned that the suspension was triggered by one of my sites — presumably this one — overloading the host server’s CPU, and so I’ve spent an unhappy day axing plugins and tidying things up in an effort to keep the server from being overloaded by requests. You’ll notice the absence of things like auto-generated “similar posts” links, social media buttons, the fuller “recent comments” sidebar widget, and other features. Further cuts may be in the offing; we’ll see. I think I heard the president say last night that this is a time of shared national sacrifice. When you’re blogging on a cheap shared hosting plan, you quickly learn all about sacrifice.
Oh, and as long as I’m dealing in political platitudes: if you’re currently blogging on WordPress.com and chafing at some of the restrictions, don’t be too quick to rush into self-hosting thinking you’ll have more freedom across the board. In some areas — e.g. bandwidth and other usage caps, never an issue at WP.com — you’ll have less. And in any case, this kind of freedom definitely isn’t free.
Odes to Tools now in print
Via Negativa has just given birth to its first all-analog offspring: Odes to Tools. The collection of 25 poems is now available through Amazon and from Phoenicia Publishing. Click through to read the catalog description and see a preview. Here’s an excerpt:
A great many poetry lovers already know and appreciate Dave’s writing, but [...] Odes to Tools is also one of those subversive cross-over books, perfect as a gift for someone who loves tools but thinks they don’t like poetry. They’ll be surprised to find a poet who appreciates tools with his words in much the same way they take care of their own saws or planes: not wrapped in fancy fabric or elevated like sculptures, but held comfortably in the hands, thought about like friends, and cared for now and then with a little oil on a clean cloth.
The book is just $6.95, but if you’d like a signed copy, you’ll have to mail me a check or postal money order for U.S. $10.00. Send to: Dave Bonta, PO Box 68, Tyrone, PA 16686, USA. I have yet to put in a bulk order, so if you’re in a hurry, order it from the publisher or from Amazon (where you can get free shipping if you bundle it with other stuff).
I also recorded a free audio version of the book, just under half an hour long. It’s not an official Woodrat Podcast episode, but the Flash player I use for the podcasts will show up here, too. (And in case you missed it, I talked all about the book, and my surprise at finding out it was going to be published, in Episode 2 of the podcast: a conversation with Beth Adams about Phoenicia Publishing, singing in a cathedral choir, and much else besides.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:17 — 26.8MB)
Banjo Origins: The Pleistocene
They say the banjo evolved here, like the horse & the cheetah, only to go extinct after the first influx of human immigrants. Siberian hunters would’ve known the use of a taut hide for calling ancestors, but add strings & perhaps the other world gets too familiar, like a mammoth looming out of the fog or a short-faced bear, the sudden bone knife of a moon — things best kept at arm’s length. Imagine calling hai ai ai & hearing plucked strings respond with a hee and a haw, dancers turning from a shuffle to a caribooted tap. Maybe the spirits started joining in instead of waiting for a properly trained shaman to come visit.
No one knows exactly why the first banjos died out, but unaccustomed to humans & our devious forms of disguise, the way we wear others’ skins & paint ourselves the color of life when we mean to kill, the banjos would’ve been easy prey, ripe for the picking. Picture that last & most furtive banjo, its store of songs incomprehensible to anyone but itself, how silence must’ve made it taciturn & given it the uncanny ability to hear, by pressing its one enormous ear to the earth, whatever might’ve been coming on the lone prairie.
Woodrat Podcast 3: Embodied Miracles
Rachel Barenblat on poetry and religion
Rachel talks about writing poetry vs. writing liturgy, studying with David Lehman, images of motherhood and divinity, wordless prayers, and the challenges of writing while caring for an infant. Two-month-old Drew adds a few wordless prayers of his own.
Links:
- Velveteen Rabbi website
- Velveteen Rabbi blog
- @velveteenrabbi on Twitter
- Torah poems at VR
- Miscarriage poems: “Through”
- The new series of mother poems
- David Lehman
- ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:42 — 31.8MB)
Posted by Dave Bonta in Audio, Philosophy/Religion, Poets and poetry, Woodrat Podcast
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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.-
"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.
Welcome
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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