Livestock

goat tree

Enormous oak
the daylight moon in its branches
a goat at its foot

Valentine cow

Holstein with a heart
in the middle of her forehead
loves the salt lick

horse piss

Horses in the shade
of a weeping willow
a cascade of piss

I am an enemy combatant

It’s a scene straight out of The Gulag Archipelago:

Some of the poems written by inmates were first scrawled in toothpaste on Styrofoam cups or etched into the cups with small stones, since in their first year of captivity the prisoners were not allowed to use pen and paper.

Any poem found by prison guards was confiscated and usually destroyed, the former prisoners say. …

Authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems … arguing that inmates could use the works to pass coded messages to other militants outside. …

Hundreds of poems remain suppressed by the military … [which] believes that their original Arabic or Pashto versions represent an enhanced security risk.

[A military spokesman said] they have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas … [He] had not, at the time, read the poems.

The prisoners remain entirely cut off from the world: military censors excise all references to current events from the occasional letters allowed from family members, and lawyers may not tell prisoners any personal or general news unless it directly relates to their cases. Indeed, dozens of prisoners have attempted suicide by hanging, by hoarding medicine and then overdosing, or by slashing their wrists.

The military, in typical Orwellian fashion, has described these suicide attempts as incidents of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.”

This is, however, not Soviet Russia, or China, or North Korea. It’s the limbo known as Guantanamo Bay.

We truly are a nation of chickenshits. Like Jon Stewart, I was baffled by the apoplectic reaction of members of Congress to the idea that men accused of terrorism be housed in maximum security prisons “on American soil,” as the inevitable expression has it. But I guess most politicians from both parties recognized a golden opportunity to grandstand and play on their constituents’ xenophobia without running the risk of being accused of racism.

We are afraid of scary foreign invaders, perhaps because most of us are ourselves the descendents of scary foreign invaders, armed with what they took for God’s blessing on their project of theft, slavery, and genocide.

We are afraid of foreign languages and the people who speak them. What are they saying about us? Are they chanting spells to turn the cows’ milk sour and make the crops wither? Though many minority communities have preserved their languages for generations without ill effect, and evidence abounds that bilingual people are, if anything, more adaptable and imaginative than monolingual people, we continue to see linguistic diversity as a threat.

We are afraid of poetry, and suspicious of the people who write it. Why do they have to write in code? Why can’t they just come out and say what they mean? If they’re men, why can’t they engage in more manly pursuits, like playing with their firearms or watching professional wrestling?

We are afraid of ideas, and suspicious of the people who enjoy engaging with them. We seem to agree with Big Brother in 1984 that Ignorance is Strength.

We are afraid of true freedom and what it might lead to. We excel in the building of prisons and the construction of tortured logic to support our continued exploitation of global resources, natural and human. We are — as the amateur Yemeni poet in the article says — artists of insults and humiliation. We falsely conflate freedom with ownership, which is to say, slavery.

We are, above all, afraid of the truth. Even more so than most other peoples, Americans enjoy being lied to, as evidenced by our insatiable appetite for advertising and spin. The rare politician who dares to point out certain obvious truths, such as the fact that we can’t have our cake and eat it too, is quickly out of a job. The current president got the position mainly because of his ability to sound sincere while delivering vacuous, feel-good platitudes… and because he hugely outspent his opponent on advertising. And despite promising to close Guantanamo Bay, our Liar-in-Chief now himself endorses indefinite detention. A trial might reveal too many dangerous or uncomfortable truths.

I say “we” and “our,” but of course I am not really one of us, but one of them. Like the Guantanomo prisoners, I too weave coded messages into my poems, layers of meaning without which they would cease to be poems — or indeed to convey anything of the truth, which is usually complex, often paradoxical, and always inimical to the interests of the powerful. Though I don’t often mention it, figuring that surreptitious campaigns have a greater chance of success than open ones, I am engaged in a battle of ideas with those who believe that War is (or can ever lead to) Peace and the rest of it. Like the indefinite detainees, I resort to poetry because without it I believe I would go mad or commit suicide. I am an enemy combatant.

Vespicide

A newly discovered yellow jacket nest under my porch must be destroyed. The decision has been made before anyone has even laid eyes on it; removing the lattice-work to take a look would be hazardous. Dozens of hornets come zipping out at the slightest vibration — a heavy tread above their heads, for example — so we figure it must be big. It seems to be right over the door to the furnace, so there’s no question it has to go, and the sooner the better, before it grows enormous. I resolve to do it tonight, after dark.

The prospect of killing an entire colony isn’t something I relish, though I’ve done it before. A feeling of dread settles in the pit of my stomach. I go for an evening walk around the trails.

skull bolete 1

In the woods on the crest of Laurel Ridge I spy what looks like the top of a human skull resting on the moss: an enormous, bone-yellow bolete. I stand looking down at it for a while, and it’s almost an out-of-body experience.

A scolding blue jay finally snaps me out of it. It’s not clear if it’s scolding me or some other large predator, so I stand for a while longer, listening and alert.

A couple hundred feet away on another trail, a few clumps of the aptly named black trumpet mushroom are silhouetted against the moss, poised as if to herald the coming night. I consider harvesting them — they’re delicious — but decide instead to leave them alone and return the next morning with a camera.

black trumpet 2

It’s nearly dark when I get back. I fetch a large coffee can from the basement of my parents’ house and put a splash of gasoline on the bottom, then find a sturdy piece of cardboard and a box of kitchen matches. I carry it all down to the yard in front of the porch, set up a dim lantern, and gingerly remove the lattice. I can see immediately that my tried-and-true method of placing a can over the nest and quickly sliding in a cardboard lid, severing the nest’s overhead attachment, won’t work this time. The nest isn’t going to fit in the can — it’s already almost as big as my head. What’s more, it appears to be securely attached to the beam behind it.

yellow jacket nest

Plan B is simpler and more brutal. Dad mentioned he had a can of wasp and ant spray, so I go fetch that, instead: d-trans Allethrin. Rainbow brand.

Fortunately, it’s a cool night — the temperature is already in the low 50s — so resistance should be minimal. I direct a long blast of the insecticide into the opening of the nest from about two feet away, then stand back. An eerie, high-pitched boiling sound ensues. Imagine all the inhabitants of a paper city shrieking in unison. I stand in the dark listening for three or four minutes until it dies away.

The next morning, only a single hornet circles the nest, which I examine in daylight for the first time. It’s beautiful, if you can ignore the small corpses clogging the entrance. It would make a fine lampshade, I think.

Tanka

wood thrush
[audio:https://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Tanka.mp3]
Vanishing when I wake
voice changing to wood thrush song
who are you
I pull the comforter up
over the tangled blankets

mp3 link

Outside the box

Outside the box, Jack is a weary drunk, a crashing bore. Earwigs menace him with their calipers. Outside the box, Joseph Cornell steps carefully into the legs of his corduroy pants & into a pair of penny loafers & into a car with (he always thinks) three doors too many. Outside the box at dawn I heard a gunshot & wondered briefly what prisoner had met his or her end — some black angus, probably, with a barcoded label stapled to his ear. Outside the box, we are accustomed to living without hope; the other vices are in any case a far throw more entertaining. A starling with a scrap of glitter is quite ready to turn its back on all Manhattan. Outside the box, the streetwalker from some big square state named for the Indians no longer believes in the box — you can’t pay her enough for that bullshit. Inside, outside, what’s the difference? Stenciled graffiti depicting gangsters with their heads tucked under their wings begin to crop up on lampposts and parking meters. The edge of the curb becomes a liminal zone; plastic shopping bags cartwheel into traffic & vanish. What’s for supper? Outside the box, one blurry still from a security camera leads the cops to a cluttered apartment & a thousand greasy iterations of the same spiral labyrinth. The suspect is a serial — albeit unconscious — printer of his own fingertips, if nothing else. The lieutenant says, I didn’t get this job by thinking inside the box. Someone with a white cloth unfolded in his lap like a minimal newspaper sinks a knife into his steak & smiles to see it blush. It’s medium-rare, this high-plains sunrise. It tastes like iron.

Found in Translation

  • The steam that rises from a slaughtered hog on a cool morning in October, mingling with our breath
  • The missing links from a game of Telephone, complete with shrugs
  • A hole in the wall just big enough for an empty hand, a hand without a fist in it
  • A spotted feather dropped by a striped bird
  • The tribal woman pressing her face into the anthropologist’s wet clay, then raising her head & laughing, so that flakes of clay fly off
  • A formula for silence that doesn’t involve wind or distance
  • The reptile claws of ferns before there were fiddles
  • The self-censorship of clouds on a clear day
  • Tears of a potato rendered chemically unable to sprout
  • A nest of spray cans under the railroad trestle & the deep-sea visions of those who used them in lieu of oxygen
  • The royal carpet a thistle extends to bees
  • The silver hair of water going over the concrete spillway that no one stops to look at on their way to the pig roast
  • Young thrushes practicing their song over the noise of the mining trucks, perched in the shadow of the disappeared mountain
  • A stranger’s finger on your face, causing you to forget your own name for a few seconds
  • Foghorns & their incidental summons to a new life

A Blueprint for Honduras

In an ideal world, Honduran ousted president Manuel Zelaya would return to power, the coup leaders would be tried and sentenced to prison, and Zelaya’s non-binding referendum on constitutional reform would be allowed to go ahead. But we live in a world where the U.S. calls the shots, and the U.S. has basically told Zelaya: “As president you railed against us and now you come asking for help because even your ALBA friends (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador) are not much help in this one.”

The U.S. is willing to help Zelaya in order to live up to its image as a supporter of democracy, but that help will come at a price. The U.S. does not want Latin America to drift away from its sphere of influence and fall into the sphere of countries such as China, Russia, and Iran. Thus, it does not wish to betray its traditional allies that have served it well: the elites and the military, who throughout Latin American history have controlled the economies and populations of their respective countries.

This being the case, Zelaya will probably have to give up on his constitutional referendum, and the coup perpetrators (including the military that have been busy beating and killing coup opponents) will receive amnesty in return for him being allowed to finish his term. Such a result would mean a win for the conservative forces, since Zelaya’s attempt to reform the constitution in order to decentralize power and turn Honduras into a participatory democracy is what sparked the coup.

The Honduran constitution, drafted in 1982 under the auspices of the Reagan administration, was designed to concentrate power in the hands of the two ruling parties: the Liberal and the National party. These parties, in turn, are controlled by the Honduran elite, made up of wealthy businessmen and cattle ranchers. Grassroots groups and popular organizations — indigenous, women, peasant, and labor groups — are given little representation under the current constitution and hence the need for reform.

Yet not all is necessarily lost for Zelaya’s cause. Upon his return, he should appoint a new chief of the armed forces with no allegiance to the elites. He should then begin to reduce the size of the military (Costa Rica and Panama have done away with theirs) to lessen its clout and avoid a repeat of last month’s ill-advised incident. He should withdraw from the conservative Liberal party to which he belongs and from which he has moved away ideologically, and either form his own party or join forces with the leftist Democratic Union Party (PUD).

The November presidential elections should be pushed back to allow for new primaries, since the current candidates from the Liberal and National parties, Elvin Santos and Porfirio Lobo, supported the coup and have lost legitimacy in the eyes of many — and may actually have become legally ineligible to run. The general elections to follow will then be a true test of Zelaya’s popularity. If the candidate from his party were to win, a referendum on constitutional reform could be carried out some time in 2010, and perhaps Honduras would come out of this ordeal with a strengthened democracy, one that includes the Honduran poor, and a diminished, non-politicized military.

—Alexis Aguilar, Honduran American
Salisbury, Maryland

Independence day

longhorn beetle

Tired of dodging the persistent longhorn beetle, I finally let it land so it could verify that I was not a tree. Recovering from a week of crippling lower back pain, I was celebrating my personal Independence Day a day late, but the forest still had claims on me. I remembered the Sunday before, how my back had gone out just as I was sitting down, and the flies had landed on me just the same. We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think. If only we all had exoskeletons instead of these troublesome, tree-like spines!

This is how the recovery happened: I had laid down Saturday afternoon and unexpectedly fell into a deep sleep, though I had gotten plenty of sleep the night before. I dreamed I was inching across one of the high barn beams despite my bad back, a burning cigarette dangling from my lips. My father came into the barn, spotted me in the rafters, and said, “So that’s what you meant by a spiritual retreat!” When I woke up, the pain was already beginning to recede.

Fourth of July:
fireflies flash, fireworks boom,
the moon turns to fuzz.

Early American Hotbread: the best cornbread recipe ever

This is my adaptation of a recipe from the classic Cooking with Wholegrains, by Vrest and Mildred Ellen Orton, originally published in 1947. A Google search only revealed one mutilated version of this on the interwebs, so I thought I’d do my part for God and country and post it myself. This serves four to six people, goes great with chile or baked beans, only takes a half hour to make, and is, as the title suggests, the best cornbread recipe of all time. As one proof of my claim: You know how regular cornbread is kind of gross to save and eat for leftovers? Not this stuff. It’s almost as good the second time around!

EARLY AMERICAN HOTBREAD

Preheat oven or toaster oven (saves electricity!) to 425° F. Grease a nine-inch-square baking pan, ideally with lard.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the bejeesus out of one large egg. Whisk in one cup milk and two tablespoons maple syrup or honey (but really, you want maple syrup. American maple syrup, not that inferior Canadian stuff).

Sift in one cup whole wheat flour, ¾ cup corn meal (either the regular stuff or masa de harina, e.g. Maseca brand, for an even earlier American flavor), and one tablespoon baking powder. Add one teaspoon salt and stir forcefully with whisk or spoon until complete and harmonious integration is achieved. Then mix in three tablespoons of oil or melted lard with as few strokes as possible. (It’s all in the wrist.)

Spoon into the waiting pan and smoosh and smooth it until it’s flat as Kansas, then bake it for twenty minutes.

It can be cut and served immediately after removal from the oven. A good, flat metal spatula does wonders for removing hot cornbread from the pan.

*

Leftovers tip: Cut a piece of cold cornbread in half, heap a spoonful of hot salsa on each half, top with a slice of cheddar or jack cheese, and heat it in the toaster oven until the cheese is all melted and bubbly.