Dave Bonta

November 9, 2011November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Holding pattern

A wise blogging friend advised me today to stop running myself ragged trying to restore everything at once, and take as much time as I need to think through the gnarly problem of what to do with Via Negativa long-term. Moving Poems and The Morning Porch are back up on a new host, Luisa is continuing her daily poems in response to my porch posts (scroll down to see her three most recent), and I have this beachhead here until I sort things out.

Another blogger I admire recently migrated her site off of cheap shared web hosting and onto WordPress.com (which is about the same annual cost once you get the necessary upgrades), and has urged me to do the same. I’m very tempted. Via Negativa’s database is so bloated, I can’t even upload it here without trying to learn something called SSH. But even if I manage that, I have no guarantee that I won’t get kicked off this server, too, for exceeding CPU limits. This is a problem on all shared web hosting arrangements, from what I gather. Via Negativa has simply gotten too big for this environment, I think, and it’s time to either pay hundreds of dollars a year for VPS (a virtual private server — the next step up), or learn Drupal and attempt to export this beast to that more sturdily built content management system. Both options are way beyond my current technical abilites. At WordPess.com, by contrast, I’d never again have to worry about getting shut down for excessive CPU usage or crashing because of a traffic spike. Through some minor miracle I managed to import almost all VN posts to a nonce site there today, which almost made up my mind for me. But it would mean significant changes and sacrifices: most incoming links will be broken because of a slightly different permalink structure; the series will no longer work as such since they don’t support that taxonomy there (I would probably just use tags); I won’t have a fancy podcasting plugin and will have to content myself with a simple audio player for the Woodrat podcast; etc. And I will miss tinkering with the controls and pretending I really understand what makes it all fly.

November 9, 2011November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

May I have your attention please.

This is your captain speaking. We have begun final descent from limbo and expect to be landing in Via Negativa soon. Please remain seated and turn off the overhead lights.

November 6, 2011December 30, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Alma Mater

The shadow of a doubt returns from exile to find another in its place, a shadow of suspicion swollen almost into a shadow of unrest. Where once an Air Force pilot passed out leaflets claiming the Holocaust was an accounting error, now there’s a new shrine to old money. Security cameras bristle around the base of a drilling rig crowned with lights. A bicycle chained to a rack begs mutely for release. The doubt is reasonable now, a respected member of the community, & no one seems to mind that he hasn’t cast a shadow in years. He’s careful around mirrors. On the cover of his authorized biography, he stretches one powerful arm, a cross stripped of the usual ambiguity. The shadow of a smile hangs over him like a broken moon.

Prompted by this.

November 5, 2011November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

In plain sight

The hunters wrapped their treestand in camouflaged cloth. When it came time to paint the roof, they chose blue. That way, they thought, it might blend into the sky, forgetting that the deer see in black-and-white. Or maybe they remembered, and painted it to please themselves. But now their sky has fallen in, a lid on a sagging box nailed to the twin trunks of a rock oak that pull it back and forth between them in the ridgetop winds, like a prized toy.
Continue reading “In plain sight”

November 4, 2011January 9, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Homiletics

This entry is part 32 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

1.
To hold the attention of a Sunday
school class, my brother said
he once had to eat a piece of chalk.
He never said what the lesson was about,
just that the chalk was tasteless
& thoroughly indigestible.

2.
When Borges came to speak
at Penn State, he sat folded
into an easy chair on stage,
still as a lizard on a heat rock.
He quoted Basho to show
that metaphor isn’t essential—
the “ancient pond” haiku.
But as he delivered his pronouncements,
he kept smiling at something
three feet above our heads.
And seeing the smiles pass
across his blind face, we all
began to smile too,
pleased at our proximity
to such a famous solitude,
which we were sure
must’ve been flooded with light.

3.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays
from when I used to smoke, lovely
as the windows of a church
in which I can no longer kneel.
Has it really been 12 years?
Borges said: Life is a dream,
to which someone in the audience objected:
That’s a metaphor!
No, he intoned, it’s the truth.
And for some reason
everyone broke out laughing.

Based on this post from August 2009.

November 3, 2011December 30, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Magic Carpet

This entry is part 33 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

On a windy day in March,
we stop at a Chevy dealership
near Orbisonia, Pennsylvania,
for a closer look at an enormous American flag
on a too-short pole. It seems intent
on demonstrating some elemental
principle of travel.

As we watch, completely straight & sober
but feeling more stoned by the minute,
it becomes a country unto itself,
complete with its own square of sky.
Slow waves of wind beginning
out among the stars find endless,
inventive ways to pass through the striped field,
the alternating strips of crop and fallow
following the contours of a land
continually in flux, like a farmer’s dream
of swimming deep into the soil.

The medium becomes the only message.
And anti-nationalist that I am, I find
I would almost pledge allegiance
to this well-made thing
& the wind that gives it another, freer kind of life.
Where were we going, again?
We both agree we could sit here all day,
if it weren’t for the likelihood that sooner
or later someone would report us
to the police for suspicious activity.
We pull gingerly back
onto the old blue road.

I’m mining the Via Negativa archive for poetic material. This derives from a 2005 post, Stars and stripes.

November 2, 2011September 30, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Ab Ovo

This entry is part 1 of 34 in the series Small World

The egg was breathing
so quietly you wouldn’t
have known it was alive.
No clouds appeared in
its immaculate atmosphere.
It was a belly in search of a buddha,
a featureless head, a round number.
It balanced on a single point
with far less effort than
a ballerina. After a while,
it got the idea that it was a bean,
& one day would open green wings
& lead the way to the sun, which
didn’t look entirely unattainable.
The strongest hand
couldn’t crush it.
Who’d have thought that warm center
it had always taken for a heart
had other plans?

November 1, 2011December 30, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Saint Death

Santa Muerte, hear me: you are my last shot.
Lady of the Night: my jealous skeleton.
I promise to tell no one about us—
how you inhabit me, put the world in my hands.
How I dress you in red robes
& in green.
How your hourglass almost stops time.
People might guess when they smell
your incense on my clothes
& see me glowing
from the decomposition of my troubles.
We’ll exchange knowing glances,
your other admirers & I—
we are in this together.
Our shadows don’t disappear
when the sun goes down;
they simply become one.
Señora, you have us for life.

See the Wikipedia article.

October 30, 2011February 9, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Dog Logic

This entry is part 1 of 29 in the series Conversari

Do I smell of dalmatian?
Are these damned spots
in my vision ever going
to shrink? I should stop
watering them with tears—
putting my head out
the window as we drive
& facing into the wind.
Surely at this speed
I should be seeing stripes?
But no, these little blanks
are everywhere I look
& sharply delineated, like
a stray cat slinking in
to drink milk: lapidary.
Impossible to catch.

With thanks to A.R. for the opening line.

See the photographic response by Rachel Rawlins, “clean dried.”

October 29, 2011May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

October snow (video haiku)

watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube

I uploaded an image to my photohaikublog, but thought I’d try a video haiku, too. I’m not sure the latter is as successful as the former, but you can be the judge.

I guess we’ve gotten in excess of five wet inches here as of 4:00 p.m., with more predicted to come. Fortunately, it’s warmed up a bit, causing much of the snow to drop from the trees. Most of our oaks and tulip trees are still in leaf, so a heavy, wet snowfall this time of year can be a destructive thing.

Speaking of trees, we are in desperate need of hosts for upcoming editions of the Festival of the Trees, the monthly blog carnival for all things arboreal.

Speaking of blog carnivals, check out the first anniversary edition of the >Language >Place carnival at Dorothee Lang’s personal blog, life is a journey. The theme this time is “Streets, Signs, Directions.”