Dance, house.
White as a corpse in moonlight,
in sunlight white as a small hill of salt.
Dance in your wig of rain streaming from the eaves.
We who pass through you, who sleep
under your asphalt-shingled hat
are little more than ghosts.
The earth might move or it might not,
but thunder comes knocking almost every day in the summer.
How long can you sit while the moon circles like a madman
& flowers fade?
You don’t have forever, that sterile seed.
Somewhere on the other side of the world,
with nothing but water beneath it,
a white sail rocks.
Corn moon
Too hot to sleep
I bask in the moonlight’s
illusion of coolness
*
A warm breeze
fireflies come blinking
out of the shadows
*
Katydids chant
full moon full moon full moon
a passing jet
*
Staring at the moon
I wish I too could be buried
up to my neck
Regress report
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.
Notes
How many notes to self can you take?
A road nobody drives for pleasure.
Scan the dial for something
sung in drawl. Get out & walk.
The older you get, the fewer options
still tempt you: the wet membranes through which
light enters our heads versus the eardrum,
coins in a fountain versus coins in a jar.
And if you want to feel every note
you find a desert, even one small as a banjo head
or unreachable as the moon.
You go to a tattoo shop
& ask them to take dictation
on the parchment of your arm.
Don’t try to explain.
This isn’t that kind of trip.
Sonorous beetles
Apocryphal or not, the famous J. B. S. Haldane quote about the Creator’s inordinate fondness for beetles has thoroughly confused god and beetle in my mind. As with most matters theological, of course, the Egyptians got there first, and so sacred and scarab also seem to me to have a very close kinship. The Spanish word for beetle is a cognate of scarab, escarabajo, and I was pleased to run across it yesterday morning in Lorca’s Poema del cante jondo (“Poem of the Deep Song”), in a poem called “Castanet.”
Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Escarabajo sonoro.En la araña
de la mano
rizas el aire
cálida,
y te ahogas en tu trino
de palo.Castanet.
Castanet.
Castanet.
Sonorous beetle.In the spider
of the hand
you make the warm
air ripple
and you suffocate
in your wooden trill.
Last night toward dusk, as I sat working at my computer, I became aware of a ticking noise in the kitchen. Thinking I might be able to surprise a mouse in some act of destruction, I snuck in as quietly as I could. The noise was coming from right beside the sink. A large brown click beetle had become ensnared in a spiderweb next to the sponge (and yes, this is a good indication of the quality of my housekeeping), hanging upside-down about an inch above the counter, and it was trying to escape the only way it knew how: by snapping the hinge of its body every few seconds. After each attempt, the tiny spider — about a tenth the size of the beetle — rushed in with another sticky grappling thread. Lorca’s lines suddenly seemed strangely prophetic.
For once, I decided to intervene and not let nature take its course, in part because I like click beetles better than I like spiders, but also because I knew if I let the clicking continue, aware now of what it meant, I would probably end up dreaming of time-bombs or the clock ticking down to my own eventual death. And a hinge, after all, is a synecdoche for a door. You want it free to swing open when the time comes. I released the beetle back into the sink to resume whatever it had been doing before it blundered into the web.
Around midnight, another noise got me out of my chair. This time it came from the front doorsill. Rather than turn on the overhead light, I grabbed my flashlight from the end of the table. There, bumbling along the bottom edge of the door, was the largest beetle I had ever seen on the mountain — some kind of longhorn beetle, I thought, but that didn’t narrow it down much. It was about two inches long, all black, and sported a pair of mandibles that gaped open and snapped shut with a faintly audible click. I scooped it up in a drinking glass so I could give it to my brother Steve, a beetle collector, when he stopped by the next morning.
This beetle too had come a cropper of some spiderweb, which I removed from its mandibles as best I could with a pencil. It seemed unable or at least disinclined to fly, so I left the glass open, but it made me a little uneasy being the guardian of such an enormous beetle — as if I’d imprisoned a minor god. In the morning I took the glass outside for some pictures, but the beetle had lapsed into a slight curl to fit the bottom of the glass and I had to poke at it with a grass stem to get it to uncurl and open its mandibles.
Steve had been having some really bad car troubles, among other things, but perked up a bit when he saw the beetle. “That’s a female Prionus laticollis,” he said, and spelled it out for me so I could look it up online. “The females are a bit larger than the males but have shorter antennae. The common name is ‘broadnecked root-borer.’ They’re not too common up here because they feed on the roots of fruit trees — they’re considered a pest. Yeah, this one’s a female. See the distended abdomen? She’s full of eggs.”
So if not the mother of all beetles, this was certainly the mother of some. Given the species’ tree-destroying habits, I wasn’t too upset when Steve decided to keep her for his collection, which he shares with his best friend Sam Wells, a professional entomologist — the Bonta-Wells, or Bowells, collection. He rummaged around in the bulging daypack he carries everywhere, found a mostly empty vial of alcohol, and popped her in. “Bonta-Wells can definitely use another Prionus laticollis,” he chortled. God isn’t the one with an inordinate fondness for beetles.
Curriculum Vitae
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.
Swallowtail
On a twig next to my sidewalk, a few feet away from the spicebush I found a spicebush swallowtail drying its wings, the empty chrysalis below. It was just past noon, but the sky was growing dark. The storm broke an hour later, just as I was dozing off: booms of thunder, the rain loud on the roof. I had to get up because, though I don’t ordinarily suffer from loneliness, it’s hard to lie on a bed alone listening to the rain.
One cool thing about including a photo in a post like this: readers know I’m talking about a real butterfly and not just something I dreamt. This ain’t no Zhuangzi bullshit.
Then again, Zhuangzi’s parable isn’t really about the butterfly as metaphor, either. It’s about that sudden and destabilizing shift in perspective which I think any intent observer, poet or scientist, must sooner or later experience, too, that feeling of becoming lost in another being to such an extent that its reality begins to seem more real than your own. How do you know that you’re not just something a butterfly dreamt up? “This” — not the metamorphosis per se — “is called the transformation of things.” Granted, it might be possible to experience that sort of thing through romantic love, too, or so I’ve heard.
I went out after the downpour to look for the swallowtail, but it was nowhere to be found. A yellow tiger swallowtail with one wing strangely bent back was nectaring at the bergamot, setting off small showers at each new flower head.
Eight questions
Last month, I responded to a five-question interview meme. For readers unfamiliar with blogging customs, a blog meme is like a chain letter: if you don’t pass it on, you haven’t properly completed the meme. I was supposed to come up with five new questions of my own and tag five bloggers, but five seemed too few. How about eight questions instead?
- Is half a stone still a whole stone?
- Do grains of sand get tired of being recycled into mountains?
- If you crossed a bat with a mushroom, would you get an umbrella?
- Do the glasses one wears in a dream require a prescription?
- What songs do they sing in a school without windows?
- Do the daisies love us or not?
- Is there any reason to believe that we’ll have working mouthparts in the next life?
- What kind of cartilage connects us to the stars?
Now the challenge is to find eight bloggers who might actually enjoy answering such questions. Let’s see. How about:
- Julia Martin at Clumps and Voids
- Siona at autobiology
- Dale at mole
- Deb Scott at Stoney Moss
- PF Anderson at Rosefire Rising
- Hannah Stephenson at The Storialist
- Peter at slow reads
- Sarah Sloat at The Rain in My Purse
Of course, being tagged in this fashion confers no obligation whatsoever, and anyone not on the list is also free to tackle the questions. Please leave a link to your answers in the comments.
Adventures in laissez-faire gardening: growing a moss garden
The last time I wrote about a moss garden, it was in the context of what I like to think of as Daoist gardening: stumbling on a perfect, more or less untrammeled spot, erecting a temporary mental frame around it, and recognizing it as a garden in need of no actual horticultural interference. This seems to me to be the only form of gardening in full accord with the ancient Daoist principle of wu wei (effortless doing) as described in the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi. The spot in question was on a talus slope about a half-mile from the house. It looks like this:
Ten days ago I decided to try something a little less Daoist and start a moss garden closer to home — right outside my door, in fact. A 25-square-foot patch bounded by the house, the front stoop, a concrete sidewalk and a brick walk has been getting shadier and shadier as the spicebush I planted there some 15 years ago has grown up. Additional shade is provided by the house to the northeast, a stone wall a few feet away to the northwest, and beyond the wall, a flourishing lilac. Last year when we scraped and painted the house, we compacted the soil everywhere we stood. This spring, some of these areas failed to revegetate immediately — especially in the shady spot under the spicebush.
At first I was worried. For at least ten years, the spot has been covered with a beautiful variety of speedwell (Persian, perhaps? It was a volunteer), which I encouraged by weeding out all competitors except for some top-heading garlic. It was a carpet of blue every May. But now the speedwell, true to its name, has jumped the walk and established a more flourishing patch in the sunnier part of my garden. And then I started to notice that the bare patches were turning green. So I started pulling out the speedwell and garlic and noticed little patches of moss coming in all over. My usual, laissez-faire approach to gardening involves pulling out all the grass and a few other undesirable plants and seeing what comes in, augmented by a few intentional plantings from time to time. Why not pull out everything except the moss, keep it weeded and watered, and see if the moss takes over?
Heavily compacted, naturally acidic soil is the perfect growing medium for moss. To help things along, I fetched a heavy iron tamping tool from the shed and compacted the entire site as much as I could. By removing the existing groundcover, of course, I’ve made the spot more susceptible to drying out, so this commits me to daily watering until the moss takes hold. It’s become an after-dinner ritual.
I did some web research and turned up an intriguing-sounding technique for getting moss established: collect bunches of it and toss them in a blender with diluted beer or buttermilk, blend just enough to create a slurry, and spread it with a spatula on bare patches. I’m glad to know there’s a fall-back plan in case my laissez-faire approach doesn’t work. But I’m already seeing a faint haze of green in some areas that were brown a week ago — look in the center of the following photo:
When I was a kid and heavily into vegetable gardening, I loved the central mystery of it: how you buried this dead-looking little seed and a plant would come up. Moss is in a way even more wondrous, since it lacks seeds and flowers altogether, doesn’t make a clear distinction between stems and leaves, and seems inescapably plural. Not coincidentally, I had written a poem about moss just a couple days before I made the decision to dedicate a portion of my front garden to it. So more than anything, this is an experiment in what one might call poetry actualization. I’ll keep you posted.
Forecast
Highs will exceed 100
with a 30% chance of suicide.
We will envy dogs their long tongues
& they our ability to shed.
Rain will fall part-way
to the ground & evaporate,
like a name you almost remember
& then you can’t.
You’ll see a rabbit sprawled
in the shaded driveway:
its lucky left foot points
toward hidden water.
An earwig in the kitchen
will carry its calipers upright
like the nerdiest of engineers,
& later on you will consider this
to have been a portent,
because the power will fail
& the air will go unconditioned,
shutting down cities
throughout the effete northeast.
We will give up on
the power company,
decide we are the ones
we’ve been waiting for
& reach for our genitals as if
they were real flowers.
We will think the next
wandering breeze was meant
just for us.