Year: 2010

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Foggy year

A selection of Morning Porch tweets from 2007-2010, arranged into a single year.

Jan 6
Dripping fog, the snow reduced to patches. Mating season has come for the great-horned owls calling in the distance, one high, one low.

Jan 17
Fog. A distant chainsaw in one direction and in the other, rodent teeth. Amorous squirrels race back and forth over the white ground.

Jan 25
Twelve hours of downpour and the stream’s a torrent, water clear from running off frozen ground. Small clouds rise like spirits from the snow.

Feb 6
Ground-level clouds appear and disappear in the half-dark; even the thermometer is fogged up. Over the roar of the stream, a robin’s song.

Feb 11
Fog drifts through the woods where rain has reduced the snow to archipelagos. Overhead the clouds, too, are breaking up. Low-flying geese.

Feb 23
Thick fog prolongs the early-morning light for hours. The cardinal sings spring while a screech owl quavers over the luminous snow.

Mar 4
Rain and fog. A robin drops into the barberry bush, tut-tutting. Up in the woods, two deer stand with their heads buried in the soft snow.

Mar 18
Bluebird, white-throated sparrow, a starling’s liquid note, and high overhead, a kildeer: the sky must be blue above the fog.

Mar 19
Hours of hard rain have brought out the green in tree trunks and branches, in laurel leaves, in moss. Even the fog has a slight green cast.

Mar 28
Thick fog blanks everything but the noise from the highway—this could be New Jersey. Rain beads on the branches of the ornamental cherry.

Mar 29
When the sun finally breaches the fog, the forest drips with jewels. In the yard, the first native wildflower opens its pin-sized blooms.

Apr 4
Somewhere in the fog, a red-winged blackbird, a pair of mourning doves, a robin, a flock of finches. Half an hour later, nothing but rain.

Apr 14
Thick ground fog, one degree below freezing. The trees grow sharper as the sun begins to blur. Please don’t flower yet, I tell the oaks.

Apr 25
Sometime past 7:30, the birds fall silent for half a minute and there’s only fog, a slow drip from leaves no larger than squirrels’ ears.

May 6
The gray winter pelts of two grazing deer are just beginning to fray. The fog withdraws into the woods and the webs of grass spiders.

May 15
Sun through fog. Animals emerge and vanish like actors in a play, bringing their cries and silences: goldfinches, a raven, a pair of deer.

May 27
Fog. The ants who tend the peony buds have been replaced by drops of water—all but one, who moves slow as an astronaut on a strange planet.

May 28
Pale bones of the dead elm, standing at the edge of the yard like an emissary from Lent amidst a Mardi Gras of green, reach into fog.

Jun 4
Foggy morning. A short-lived bright period brings a faint sound of traffic from I-99. I hear the hummingbird’s small motor in the garden.

Jul 8
The little wood satyr I first spotted yesterday flutters up from the side garden, yellow-rimmed eyespots like dim headlights in the fog.

Jul 9
Thin fog in the corner of the field. A Cooper’s hawk fledgling responds to its parent, a hot cry, a knife cry, a glossy cry, a soul cry.

Aug 1
I watch a yellow black walnut leaf flutter to the ground. Autumn’s in the air. Fog persists most of the morning, lit up from above.

Aug 14
Thin fog. Now that the phoebes have left, their shy cousins the pewees have come out of the woods, and herald each sunrise in a slow drawl.

Aug 17
Dawn fog lifts and pauses, so it’s clear to a height of ten feet, then white, then the crescent moon. A red-bellied woodpecker’s slow chant.

Aug 20
The fog reveals as much as it hides. Who knew the trees held so many spiderwebs? The birds are mostly quiet now; it’s cricket spring.

Aug 29
Rain and fog. Nuthatches, a wood pewee, the liquid song of a winter wren. Behind me, loud thumps from some large animal under the house.

Aug 30
Out of the darkness and fog before dawn, a sudden yelp. Only when it moves farther off am I able to place it: a raccoon. The newest tenant.

Sep 4
Thin fog at dawn. From the woods’ edge, the familiar two-syllable call of a scarlet tanager sounds suddenly very much like goodbye.

Sep 21
In the pre-dawn, Sunday-morning silence, the distant bellowing of a cow. A half moon glows through the fog—a thin milk.

Sep 27
First one, then a second Carolina wren pops out from under the eaves, perches in the fretwork for a second, and flies off into the fog.

Oct 1
A pileated woodpecker hammers on a dead tree, resonant as it never was in life. I watch ground fog form and dissipate into a clear dawn sky.

Oct 5
Through the darkness and fog, loud thuds from the black walnut trees that encircle the houses, a slow carpet bombing that goes on for weeks.

Nov 12
A pair of ravens fly low over the house, invisible in the fog. I’m lost in thought about trickster gods, and right on cue: Arrk! Arrk! Arrk!

Nov 19
Drizzle turns into downpour and the fog retreats up the ridge. An hour later the rain eases and the fog rolls in again, erasing the trees.

Nov 24
Rain and fog with raven: silent, just above the treetops. White-throated sparrows and a freight train whistling at the same pitch.

Dec 10
Rain and fog. Only the low rumbly sounds break through: a jet, a train. Sitting in the dark, it’s almost possible to believe in isolation.

Dec 23
Thick fog at dawn, gray against the snow. Slate-colored juncos call back and forth: Where are you? A wind comes up.

Dec 27
In the darkness and fog, the sound of slush being punctured and scraped aside. I can just make out the solid shadows, their many thin legs.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Natural Faculties

This entry is part 2 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

Lines from Galen, translated by Arthur John Brock (1916)

1.
When a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm
When anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist
When a small thing becomes bigger
When food turns into blood
When the limbs have their position altered
When, therefore, the animal has attained its complete size
When the matter that flows into each part of the body in the form of nutriment is being worked up into it
When the vapours have passed through the coats of the stomach and intestines
When this has been made quite clear
When the iron has another piece brought into contact with it
When a small body becomes entangeld with another small body
When our peasants are bringing corn from the country into the city in wagons

2.
Children take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm but not to injure them. This is a common game in the district of Ionia, and among not a few other nations. As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size.

3.
Imagine the heart to be, at the beginning, so small as to differ in no respect from a millet-seed, or, if you will, a bean…

4.
Now, clearly, in these doings of the children, the more the interior cavity of the bladder increases in size, the thinner, necessarily, does its substance become

common to all kinds of motion is change

tangible distinctions are hardness and softness, viscosity, friability, lightness, heaviness, density, rarity, smoothness, roughness, thickness and thinness; all of these have been duly mentioned by Aristotle

Nature constructs bone, cartilage, nerve, membrane, ligament, vein, and so forth, at the first stage of the animal’s genesis

pain is common to all these conditions

please test this assertion first in the muscles themselves

5.
This also was unknown to Erasistratus, whom nothing escaped.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Opposite of erasure

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 on by Dave Bonta

The End of the West, by Michael Dickman

The End of the West

The West may end at the Pacific, but frontiers keep opening like needle holes in a junkie’s arm, like the “bright/ plastic” of an artificial intestine, like whales “moving the sea around.”

My grandmother set sail on a small air mattress into the middle of
the pool and fell asleep

Her fingers
dragging the water
(“Marco Polo”)

The paperback book itself literally expands as I read it, for reasons I don’t fully understand: it now has a pronounced bulge an inch from the spine, as if I’d stuffed it with invisible bookmarks, one per page. As if it had somehow gotten pregnant from my reading.

And The End of the West does invite an Old Testament kind of knowing, biblical as it is in its gritty, this-worldly god-talk, its at-times astonishing beauty, and its episodes of inexplicable violence.

Yesterday we put all the kids in the car, doused it with gasoline, and
lit it on fire

Their eyelids
and toe-
nails

That was one day

The snow geese migrating above us in the dark was another
(“Late Meditation”)

Michael Dickman is one half of a pair of young, identical-twin poets with first books out from the revered Copper Canyon Press. I haven’t read Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem yet, nor have I read the full profile of the twins in the New Yorker, and I usually avoid anything that everyone is talking about as a matter of principle, but I can tell you that The End of the West deserves all the hype it can get. It’s good.

It’s also a very good fit for the Copper Canyon catalog. Again, I mean that literally: in the Fall 2009/Winter 2010 Copper Canyon Reader [PDF], the excerpt from “Late Meditation” sits comfortably across the page from a prose poem by Lisa Olstein, from Lost Alphabet (“I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack in the center of my fist…”), and transitions quite naturally to a two-page W.S. Merwin spread, including the poem “Still Morning” from The Shadow of Sirius.

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age

writes Merwin, as if in answer to critics of the youthful Dickmans. My point is that Michael Dickman’s poems excel at the kind of surrealism-tinged revelatory insight in which Copper Canyon seems to specialize. Or as a review in The Believer put it, “Dickman continually unites the accurate (in terms of perception, thought, emotion) with the mysterious, and he does so in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable…”

This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
as we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up
(“We Did Not Make Ourselves”)

At the same time, the working-class, post-industrial urban landscape grounds and balances the revelatory moments. “Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove,” for example, includes late-night dog-walkers

Bending down
to scrape shit off the sidewalk
into little plastic bags

“Some of the Men” begins:

I had to walk around for a long time before I could see anything

The leaves
circling down the street
imitating the insides of seashells
imitating
my fingerprints

I could sense my father
sitting along in his little white Le Car
staring off at the empty parking lot

No radio
No wind
No birds

You’ve probably realized by now that the poem in my previous post, “Bridge to Nowhere,” was a shameless imitation of Michael Dickman. This is the kind of poetry I hope to write when I grow up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bridge to Nowhere

This entry is part 1 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

bridge to nowhere

Bridge to nowhere:
tree roots dangle
into the abyss

Teens spray-paint the year
they hope to graduate
then huff the rest

A friend says:
there is no way to the father
but through the highway

A gay prostitute
stands in the river & flashes
passing trucks

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 17: Brent Goodman

Brent Goodman

I called up poet Brent Goodman (website/blog) in the north woods of Wisconsin and got him talking about how he ended up there; whether his day job as a copy writer for a pet supply company affects his creative writing; how blogging helped him put his first book together; his heart attack last year and how that’s effected his life and outlook; how he met his partner; what it’s like living in the boondocks as a gay man; writing poems about television; and what writers inspire him. Poems read: “Directions to My House,” “Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing,” “The Ground Left Me,” “Man Smashes 29 Televisions at Georgia Walmart,” and “5 Poets Who Changed My Life (Postcards from Intersections).”

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Without Television

Without television, what names would you give the weather?

Without television, would the continent of Africa still resemble a question mark?

Without television, how many majestic carnivores would dine alone?

Without television, when would five o’clock shadows begin to form?

Without television, who would grumble for a flat belly or lust after an immaculate confection?

Without television, how would the couch make change?

Without television, where would you hear the subliminal messages telling you to kill again?

Without television, what circus tout would you pay to belabor your faults?

Without television, who would volunteer for boredom?

Without television, would we become strangers to ourselves?

Without television, do the fish get all their news from the water?

*

Sparked by a phone conversation with Brent Goodman (to be featured in this week’s Woodrat podcast, if and when I finish editing it) and an email conversation with some other friends about the Dark Mountain Project.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A Walk up Plummer’s Hollow

You can also view the slideshow at Flickr, or browse the photoset if you’re on a slow connection. Be sure to click on the four-arrows icon on the bottom right to expand the slideshow to full screen (because otherwise, what’s the point?) and click on “more info” to read titles and captions.

I’ve always wanted to make a slideshow from a single walk up Plummer’s Hollow Road, and today seemed like a good time: the air was as clear as it gets, the leaves are almost fully out, and the late spring wildflowers are at their peak, while some of the earlier ones are still holding on. I was also spurred on by the weather forecast, which is predicting a cold rain tomorrow — the day when a Penn State landscape architecture class is scheduled to visit. I wanted to give them a good idea of what the hollow would’ve looked like had they visited just one day earlier. But I thought it would be fun to share with Via Negativa readers, too, since at least 90 percent of you aren’t within driving distance. (If you are local, the road is open to walkers for most of the distance — you’ll see the “end of public access” sign at the forks.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Kingfisher, by Amy Clampitt

The Kingfisher cover
Hi Mom! I got you a poetry book again this year: The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt, a major contemporary American poet’s first book. I wasn’t really familiar with her work, except by reputation and a few poems in anthologies, until I happened to pick this up at Webster’s the other month, but when I saw it had an epigraph by Gerard Manley Hopkins (“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”), I had a strong feeling it might be your kind of book — and mine too. I stood in the bookstore opening it at random, and each time I found myself saying, “Yup, Mom would like this!”

It’s not just the fact that Clampitt’s subjects are often taken from the natural world, but the way she writes about them — a poem about an orchid, for instance, ends with her crouching down to sniff it, just as you would do — and the philosophical ends they serve. I couldn’t help thinking of some of your own favorite themes, in your writing and in dinner-table conversations, when I read a poem about Good Friday that makes room for Serengeti lions and Charles Darwin, another poem that references the myth of Prometheus to critique our addiction to petroleum (and before that, whale oil), and a poem called “The Quarry,” which contains lines like these:

Think back
a little, to what would have been
without this festering of lights at night,
this grid of homesteads, this hardening
lymph of haste foreshortened into highways…

— which made me think of our own local quarry, so often drowning out the bird calls with its grinding and roaring to feed our supposed need for ever new highways.

I was impressed by the notes Clampitt included at the back of her book, so much more helpful than what poets usually include, afraid perhaps that going into too much detail will make readers think their poems can’t stand on their own. It’s a legitimate fear, though: how much commentary is the average reader willing to endure to understand a poem? I do worry quite a bit about the fate of poetry, mine and others’, that assumes a basic familiarity with natural history, astronomy, the Bible, Greek mythology, and other elements of what used to be considered a complete education. Perhaps I need to update my informal guideline for whether or not to include a note to a poem, which has always been: “Would Mom get this without having to look it up?”

Though still in mint condition, the book is aging, I’m afraid. It was printed in 1983, the year I graduated from high school — which believe it or not was 27 freakin’ years ago! — and the spine made an ominous complaining noise at one point when I opened the pages too far, so do be careful. I think you’ll find it a fitting companion for your books by Mary Oliver, Louise Bogan, May Swenson, and all the others I’ve given you for Mother’s Day over the years. It’s not an unbroken tradition — some years I have given you other things, haven’t I? — but you always seem to appreciate getting poetry books, as witnessed by the fact that you almost always read them right away, and of course I enjoy giving them. And if I can say this without getting too maudlin here, it makes me think how goddamn lucky I am to have a mother who not only reads my own stuff, but also reads and enjoys poetry in general. In my years of blogging and getting to know other online writers, I’ve come to realize just how rare that is. Many if not most of my blogging friends say their parents don’t really get what they’re doing, and some even have to use pseudonyms or avoid using their last names just to make sure their parents never find out that they’re blogging.

You and Dad, by contrast, have been my most regular and supportive readers since Day 1, and I can’t thank you enough for that. We’re not a very demonstrative family, so this is as awkward for me to write as it I suppose it is embarrassing for you to read, but I wanted to say it in public because who knows if and when I’ll ever publish that full-length collection of poems that I can dedicate to you guys. Thanks not only for the support but for the conversation, the friendship, and the inspiration of your example. Anyone who’s ever read your work has probably sensed how conscientious you are about getting the facts straight, and I think — I hope — that’s influenced me, especially given how prone we Bonta males are to B.S. and bontification, as you call it. In my new series of bestiary poems, for instance, I’m trying to make sure that no assertion, however imaginative, departs too far from what scientists think they know about the species in question.

What scientists think they know. It occurs to me that even my basic apophatic stance, as reflected in the title of this blog, is partly due to your influence: decades of hearing you marvel at, or sometimes rant about, just how little we know about even our most common fellow denizens of the planet, how much basic taxonomy still needs to be done, to say nothing of studies on behavior, life history, ecological relationships and ecosystem functioning… you’ve made me realize how sadly inappropriate our species name sapiens truly is. But

the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

There’s a lot we have still to unlearn, Clampitt seems to be saying, and the resulting vertigo can be delightful. I hope you’ll find her language and perspectives, her blending of the erudite and the down-to-earth, as rewarding as I do. Happy Mother’s Day.