Dave Bonta

July 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Palimpsest

At last the author relinquishes his hold on the book he has been struggling to finish for almost a century. There’s a sound like the rapid turning of pages, or the beating of wings.

Two vultures were circling low above the treetops, as if in a slow-motion chase. I watched their shadows move through the forest, sliding up and down trunks and gliding over the shiny leaves of the laurel. On a cool morning, they were looking for light and warmth like everyone else. They were looking for a lift.

It’s not the vultures’ fault if their very name provokes fear and revulsion, simply because we are ashamed of where we came from. We too are scavengers with naked faces and an aesthetic preference for clean, straight bones. In the middle of the day, when the predators retreat to the shade, we venture out, alert to the crushed leaf, the snapped twig, the blood-dark berry. Stark contrasts are pleasing to us. The savanna — half grass, half trees — was our founding parchment, and we return to that garden every chance we get.

At this very moment, in some back garden in Damascus, a brand-new tree is struggling to be born.

July 24, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ode to a Shoehorn

This entry is part 24 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

A shoehorn’s a sort of
spoon-shaped chute
for the foot,
not for the shoe.
Or at best, a social lubricant
between the two,
with or without
the Freudian interpretation.

Boots are for those
who toot their own horns,
sporting as we know
the handy bootstraps,
which give the so-called
self-made men
a better metaphor for rising
to their own occasion.

July 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Having a Cow

name of god

At the busiest bus stop in the heart of the affluent college town, a middle-aged black woman flanked by bulging plastic bags sits and rails at an enemy no less real for being invisible. The passersby — students, professionals, mothers headed for the public library — lower their voices, murmuring into their clamshell phones. Those without phones mutter prayers. Those without Jesus take a strong sudden interest in the weeds sprouting through a fissure in the pavement, this thin and brittle lid on green disorder.

In the news, the former Bosnian Serb leader and instigator of genocide, Radovan Karadzic, turns out to have been hiding behind a bushy white beard and glasses all this time, selling New Age snake oil. The webpage of his alter ego, Dr. Dragan Dabic, apparently intends no irony with the English email address, “healingwounds@dragandabic.com.” At the bottom of the page appear “10 favorite ancient Chinese proverbs as selected personally by Dr. Dabic.” They include “He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them” and “The one who gives up his own, should dig two graves.”

In the news, the name of God appears in Arabic on several pieces of cooked beef in northern Nigeria. Thousands flock to see what local mullahs proclaim to be a sign of the universality of their religion. What was it like for the cow, grazing in the near-desert with the One Name growing like a tumor, thick enough to appear on three eventual cross-sections of muscle tissue? Did it burn? Did it give off light? In which part of the cow did the deity inscribe His miraculous autograph? The reports do not say, and I hesitate to hazard a guess. I recall that the second and longest sura of the Qur’an is called Al-Baqarah, “The Cow.” It takes its name from the fawn-colored heifer sacrificed by Moses at God’s command.

Responding to a relayed message about a fawn trapped in the deer fence around our three-acre wildflower sanctuary, I find instead a bluejay with what looks like a broken neck, lying on its side in the middle of the trail and bleating like a fawn in distress. I run back to the house to get the .22. Later, I try and tell dad it was a jay he heard. “Heard? I saw it, from out in the field! A light-brown, mid-sized animal, thrashing about.” But later, when he went back to check, the fawn had disappeared — escaped on its own. Perhaps the shot from the other end of the exclosure had given it the strength to break free.

Among the stones at the side of the road I notice three purple stars: Deptford pinks, blooming on two-inch stalks. Are they merely stunted by the harsh conditions, or do they represent a new, road-adapted strain? Natural selection is constant, the scientists now tell us; significant evolution in weedy plants can take place in as little as seven years, and among animals, “fewer than 40 lifetimes.” Seven, forty: such Biblical numbers! This presumes, of course, that the populations are subject to large-scale die-offs or other extraordinary stresses: prolonged droughts, the sudden arrival of competitors, the use of pesticides. That too seems Biblical.

The jay was hardly the first bird mortally injured by flying into the fence. In the seven years since we erected it with the help of our hunter friends (who had a vested interest in creating a permanent demonstration of their value to us), we’ve found a ruffed grouse, two sharp-shinned hawks, and a red-tailed hawk that all seemed to have died that way. Lord knows how many more bodies were carried off by scavengers before we could find them. In trying to protect a small patch of woods from the deer, we end up killing birds. Losing predators such as sharpies and redtails is especially bad news from an ecological standpoint, though at the same time the revitalized understory should make much better nesting habitat for migrant songbirds.

The chipmunk is in the tree again.

July 21, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Chipmunk in a tree

Chipmunk in a Mulberry Tree, from the Undiscovery Channel

Houses make superior wildlife blinds, provided your yard isn’t some manicured, chem-lawn desert. I shot this video through two panes of glass in the window next to my writing table this afternoon, a welcome break from answering qarrtsiluni correspondence. I’ve been asked why I leave the storm window down in that window year ’round, and this is part of the reason: so I don’t have to shoot through a screen.

I was originally planning to publish a grim little piece I wrote yesterday about shooting an injured bluejay, but fate intervened. If for some reason this leaves you wanting still more cute chipmunk pictures, I did post one to the photo blog, too. In four hours, it’s already racked up five times more page views than that poor mushroom photo has gotten in four days. Damn. O.K., I give up! Tune in next time for some adorable footage of puppies and kittens.

July 20, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Buck in velvet

At daybreak, the sound of hooves on gravel: a small buck accompanied at some distance by a doe meanders up the driveway, sampling the vegetation first on one side and then the other. As he rounds the bend opposite my front porch, I get a better look at the branches sprouting from his head, covered in dark-brown velvet — only four, rounded points so far, but the size and spread suggests he’ll be at least a six-point, and therefore a legal target come October.

Horns, many people call them, but the remarkable thing about antlers is that they are shed and regrow every year in a matter of months, unlike true horns, which are permanent. The energetic cost to the animal must be enormous. A rack, they call it, as if it were designed by God or evolution as a place to hang coats or display trophies. But this most prized of natural artifacts is itself a trophy — to hunters, and perhaps also to the deer, who holds his head so differently from a doe.

It’s just light enough to let me observe what he eats as he approaches the house:

the leaves of several goldenrod stalks, starting at the bottom and working toward the top;
a couple twigs of a multiflora rose bush, one of two beside the driveway that are as compactly rounded as if they’d been kept pruned by hedge-trimmers;
half of a large, compound leaf of a black walnut seedling the same age as the deer;
one stalk of wild garlic, starting with the tight fist of baby cloves at the top;
several mouthfuls of orchard grass;
the tip of a leaf of bracken fern;
some brome grass in front of the stone wall that borders my garden.

He’s near enough now that that I can hear the chewing and the smacking of lips. He crosses the road, lured by the sight of black raspberry leaves, and starts working on the end of the very cane that hosts a paper hornets’ nest at its base. A moment later, the anters jerk upright, and he bats at his shoulder with a hind leg. Then with one leap he clears the drainage ditch and lands among the cattails, twisting and rearing like a wild mustang with a bronco-buster on its back. A few seconds of that and he prances over to the woods’ edge, head still held high, to join what I imagine must be his sister — last year’s twins. If any hornets are still following him, he doesn’t show it, and neither does she. Their association is safe for at least a little longer from nature’s maddening sting.

July 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Hat season

Ah, summer — time of berry picking, vine-ripened tomatoes, corn on the cob, and big ol’ floppy hats. Because it’s also high noon for deerflies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and, well, high noon. (There’s a video that goes along with this shot, by the way. Catch it at my mother’s blog.)

I’ll admit, though, I was a little shocked when my dad traded in his usual stylin’ John Deere cap for a shapeless straw hat he found in the closet. “The brim goes all the way around with this kind of hat,” he marveled. “The mosquitoes don’t come under it.”

I’m not entirely sure the hat was made for men, but whatever. My dad is nothing if not secure in his masculinity.

It might be that Ma Nature is sending us subliminal messages, though. Between the Indian pipes and the mushrooms, hat-like things have been popping up all over the place. I watched gnats swarming around a rotting amanita yesterday: they crawled all over the top-side, but I didn’t see a single one venture beneath the brim.

Which got me to thinking there might be a big evolutionary advantage to this sort of behavior, because the underside of a mushroom, or any other projecting shelf, would be an ideal place for a spider to lurk. Maybe to the Diptera, it’s not that mushrooms are hats; hats are great big mushrooms.

Just, you know, a theory.

When your hat is your home, you take it off at your peril. Things will never again seem as safe and dark and quiet as they did under a hat. Mosquitoes will come and sing in your ears, and not only because they’re looking for a blood meal. They get a darn good echo in there. Ears, being put on sideways, probably don’t look like hiding places for spiders in most cases.

But think of the way an ear is shaped. Maybe, just maybe, the mosquitoes too are looking for a hat.

July 17, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

July Stones

video link

This morning I welcome Fiona Robyn to Via Negativa — that’s her voice in the video. Fiona’s on a blog tour to promote her book small stones: a year of moments. I’m a long-time reader of the blog from which the selections were drawn — in fact, a small stone was a major inspiration for my own daily microblogging experiment, The Morning Porch.

Fiona’s “stones” aren’t poems, exactly — some are, but others clearly are not. Each one represents a moment of quiet, focused attention, part of a daily practice which Fiona began three years ago to try and revitalize her own interest in writing. Blogging was integral to the project, it seems: from the beginning she wanted a space where she could collect and share the literary equivalent of small stones picked up on a walk and carried home in a pocket. “They might be a snatch of overheard conversation, the sun moving behind the cloud, or a cat jumping on the lawn,” Fiona writes in the introduction.

They set off a quiet ‘ah!’ inside me, like a toddler saying ‘look!’ They are nothing special and something special all at once. As time went on, I got better at remembering to notice the world around me. Not just to notice it but to scrutinize it, engage with it, love it.

When Fiona said she was publishing a book of selections from the first three years of the blog, I had my doubts about how well it work. But in fact they make a surprisingly satisfying collection. Like insects trapped in amber, the very delicacy and ephemerality of Fiona’s “stones” invite closer examination. As fragments of concentrated attention, many of them engage the reader in an active search for additional images and ramifications, in the same way that a modern translation of Sappho challenges one to fill in the lacunae.

Accordingly, in the video, I tried to leave as many lacunae as possible and let the words create the pictures. I hope it manages to excite some interest in the project (I uploaded it to YouTube, as well, for maximum exposure). Be sure to follow the links on the blog tour page for many more interviews, reviews, and conversations with the author. Consider writing your own “stones” for submission to a new, communal blog that Fiona is launching called a handful of stones. And of course check out the book.

Five minutes before midnight, a gnat attracted to the reflected light of my computer monitor dives into my eye.

July 15, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ode to a Wire Brush

This entry is part 25 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

Never was walking
a greater penance
than for one without any feet
& legs more numerous
than the corrosive rain.
And the to-&-fro of it:
pacing is a refuge
when you can’t stand still.
Do it long enough
& distraction turns into discipline,
the ground warms
& acquires the hard gleam
of an interrogator.
You confess, confess, confess.
Your tracks are covered
with a thin brown dust.

July 14, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Chaw

Night opened on her stalk and fed me a nectar of endless recursion: I am watching myself watching myself watching myself live a life, duly insured and mortgaged and stumbling over toy wagons blocking the walk. I am taking her literal nipple into my mouth and reaching for a waist as smooth as smoked glass, until the sound of chewing wakes me and I lie in the dark trying to remember what’s real. In the morning, will I really find a fist-sized hole behind the kitchen sink crawling with carpenter ants? Will the porcupine chatter at me from behind a non-functioning church organ in my dining room? And what about the mice pulling their tails through their teeth? Outside the window, a dry retching as the feral housecat regurgitates her own black fur. It could be anything.

July 13, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Brain and Nerve Food

What’s interesting about these advertisements from 1884 is that they appear on the back cover of an anthology of English poetry published by Funk & Wagnalls, a volume of something called the Standard Library — evidently an ancestor to Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf, Penguin Classics, and other such series of canonical works. It’s funny that nowadays we aren’t surprised by magazines where advertising takes up half or more of the content, but find the idea of an ad on a book — even a mass-market paperback — a little shocking. But then books are things we plan on keeping around, whereas magazines are inherently disposable.

I think about that distinction a lot, since I’m so involved in publishing a magazine online, where the average shelf-life of blogs and zines is even shorter than the xeroxed little magazines of yore. (Do the 1970s qualify as “yore” yet?) On the one hand, I accept the reality that nothing is forever, and transience is inherent in all things. On the other hand, why should artists and authors entrust their works to qarrtsiluni if it isn’t going to be around in five or ten years? Unlike a print publication, there’s no tangible artifact to sit on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust. Don’t we owe it to our contributors to keep their works online as long as possible? We’re not paying them anything, so it seems like the least we can do.

I spent much of this weekend pulling together qartsiluni‘s first-ever podcast for the Water issue, in case anyone wonders where the hell I’ve been. And my other project involved making a more secure archive for our news microblog, which will still originate on Twitter (for the time being, at any rate), but now has its main presence on the imaginatively named qarrtsiluni news blog.

Now that qarrtsiluni has a blog, perhaps its own ambiguous nature — half-blog, half-magazine — will be a little less obvious. Or maybe adding a podcast dimension simply makes our precise identity even more difficult to pin down. The Standard Library was clearly a bit of a hybrid, too, appearing bi-monthly “bound in postal card manilla,” available by annual subscription, but offered also in cloth editions and clearly meant to be permanent. Over a century later, the paper is still in fine shape — nothing like some of the pulp fiction I have from the 1940s and 50s that crumbles at the touch. Chalk it up, perhaps, to all those vitalized phos-phites.