Dave Bonta

March 26, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Mourning cloak

Snow Butterfly, from the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo.

What mourner wears maroon edged in gold? These dark wings are solar collectors, newly resurrected from hibernation or a long journey to the south. They are also billboards of a sort, advertising for sex.

But until the females emerge, there’s bare dirt and dung to eat, and snow to suckle. Find a path in the woods and make that your destination: land and circle, rise and double back. A month or more before the new leaves, your colors are made to match the fallen, the moldering. When the wind riffles the ridgetop leaves, you too can flutter. This is your glory time.

Later on, after the heat of mating is past, when the weather turns oppressively hot, you can let the strings of your life go slack a second time, creature of the in-between, of spring and autumn.

March 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Solidarity

The bus made a mid-day refueling stop somewhere in Wyoming. It was a couple days past New Year’s, the bus was half-full, and we were all going straight through to Chicago: a temporary almost-family, bound together by the driver’s friendliness and his encouragement of collective decision-making about our stops. And bound too, I guess, by the hostile weather outside, wind and snow buffeting the bus as we crossed the roof of the continent.

We smokers already had a camaraderie of our own, hurrying off the bus at every stop and huddling together near the door, helping each other get a light in the high wind. At this particular stop, a white college kid returning to Madison let it be known that he had something more than tobacco to share, so several of us followed him around to the back of the convenience store. It was strong stuff, but the wind gave cover to our coughing and quickly carried away the illicit smoke. Everything slowed. We began to talk — or shout, really — about whatever meant the most to us: music, sex, Jesus, poetry (that was me). The weak sunlight took on an epic cast.

A blast of the horn summoned us back to the bus, but we weren’t quite the last on board. In a pattern that was soon to become familiar, a 30ish African-American woman shepherded five young children back into their block of seats near the front, re-arranging their pillows and blankets, while the rest of us looked on solicitously. Plastic trash bags bulged in the overhead luggage compartments; I remember a small bedside lamp protruding from one of them. Each child clutched a small treat from the store, and solemnly began to eat. “Those are good kids, man,” someone murmured.

Then we were back on the interstate. A card game started up a few seats away, but the level of jollity receded as the miles passed, and the engine’s throb and the roar of the heaters made an auditory cocoon into which many of us withdrew. “Let me know if gets too hot for y’all back there,” the driver said. I shut my eyes, and quickly opened them again: the darkness inside was spinning like a slow whirlpool. I turned and fixed my gaze on the horizon with the devotion of a child hungry for one steady thing.

March 24, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Easter eggs

Yesterday was the first snowy Easter I can remember. I went for a walk and found, among other things, a loose jumbly nest of sticks at the top of a Hercules’-club tree that cradled a small mound of snow, and not far away, an egg-shaped melt-spot on the surface of a rock, resting in the shadows of branches. Without meaning to, it seemed, I’d gone on an Easter egg hunt. It made me think back…

Easter morning when I was small
meant candy — the first since Halloween;
a gift or two, usually including a new kite,
which I would struggle valiantly to fly
in the mountaintop’s transverse winds;
& a half-dozen eggs I had helped
to dye myself, those that weren’t already
sea-green or blue because they’d been laid
by one of our Araucana hens. We used
all-natural materials, especially
onion skins, which imparted a yellow
or orange tint depending on how long
we left the eggs in the dye bath.
Wrapping them in ferns or tree leaves
made lacy patterns where the veins
lay against the shell. It was as if
we were enacting a dream of barnyard fowl
to return to the trees.

Somehow even knowing what we would find,
& despite the fact that hard-boiled eggs
can’t compete for taste sensation with a chocolate bar,
it was still exciting to paw down through
the green plastic straw — reused year
after year — & lift them out, bright & smooth
as pebbles on a beach. Cracking such an egg
was a solemn occasion.
It made us mindful, admiring the shell
even as we split & crumbled it, & underneath
the slick flesh no longer white, but onion-colored.
The last discovery then would be a bit
anti-climatic: the yolk a dark orange
as with any egg from a chicken that’s free to roam,
to bathe in the dust, & for whatever reason,
madly flapping in front of oncoming cars,
to cross the road.
__________

In response to the Read Write Poem prompt, “Go green!” Links to other responses may be found here.

March 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Storytellers

They are on vacation with their oldest granddaughter, who will turn 12 in a few days. En route to the historic district of one small city, a building collapses half a block ahead. A huge cloud of dust rises up; traffic slows to a crawl. The grandparents take a quick glance and look away, but the girl watches intently as emergency crews pull a body from the wreckage. “He’s still alive,” she announces.

They decide not to take the walking tour after all, and continue driving to the next state park. As soon as they get out of town: “Tell me another story, Grandpa!”

“He makes up these exciting adventure stories, starring boy and girl detectives just about Eva’s age. I don’t know how he does it,” Mom tells me later. “I can’t do that. The only stories I can tell her are things I remember — true stories. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make things up the way your Grandpa does.’

“I told her about England — I was just a couple years older than her when our family went over there. She wanted to hear all about it. I told her about the friends I made, and how everyone revered the teachers so much. I explained the way the school system was back then, how kids’ futures would be determined by what kind of high school they attended. She didn’t think that was right.

“And of course I told her stories about the relatives, dwelling on the parts that I thought would interest her. I told her about that time back in Maine, waking up at 4:30 in the morning and telling Bruce, ‘Nanna just died,’ and finding out the next day that she had, at that exact time. And then when we were singing hymns at her funeral, bursting into tears when I got to the third verse of ‘Beneath the Cross of Jesus.’ It turned out that had been Nanna’s favorite verse of any hymn. It is a very pretty tune.” She starts to sing it.

I take, O cross, thy shadow
For my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than
The sunshine of His face;
Content to let the world go by,
To know no gain nor loss,
My sinful self my only shame,
My glory all the cross.

The granddaughter’s eyes go wide. She wonders if she will be that clairvoyant herself when the time comes. That night at the motel, she and her Nanna stay up late watching a DVD of the old musical “Oklahoma.” Grandpa watches a little bit of it, then retires to the bedroom. Too much tension and violence, he says. It would disturb his sleep.

March 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Medicine tree

My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that is now all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. She was Christian in her later years, but she had come a long way about, and she never forgot her birthright. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River about Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient sacrifice — to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree — a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree. Before the dance could begin, a company of soldiers rode out from Fort Sill under orders to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause an essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree. That was July 20, 1890, at the great bend of the Washita. My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (University of New Mexico Press, 1969)

March 21, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Seven facts about the ancestors

They were short. They could squat
on their haunches for hours.
They knew the right times for things.
They remembered what they heard
in a way that we who have been trained
by the measured tread of text cannot.
They had bad teeth, but better than
the farmers who followed them.
They squinted a lot.
They knew every conceivable grief
except for the small, dull kind
that accompanies the purchase
of some interchangeable part.

March 20, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Pivot point

What made the ancestral timberdoodle decide to haunt the woods’ edge instead of the shore? My mother surprised one this morning up above the old dump and watched it for a while: the oddest walk she ever saw, she said. With every step, its chest throbbed visibly, as if with some uncontrollable emotion. I went to look for it after lunch, and it flew before I spotted it on the ground. I followed it up the old woods road, camera at the ready, my eyes riveted to the spot where it landed, but each time it flushed before I could distinguish the mottled brown of its feathers from the brown leaves, which were lifting and turning over in the wind. I’ve never had the sharpest eyesight.

I noticed as I walked back that there were still a few patches of snow on the powerline right-of-way, sheltered by the thick green laurel. Up on the ridge, the wind roared and died, roared and died, not quite as regular as ocean surf.

After Stravinsky, can anyone hear the phrase “rite of spring” and not feel a shiver of strangeness? Tonight at sunset, we will be almost equidistant from this morning’s sunrise and tomorrow’s. And at dusk, if the winds die down, the woodcock will position himself out in the field with his long sandpiper’s bill pointed at the sky and project his nasal longing into the heavens, again and again. Then he’ll launch his fat body several hundred feet straight up and fly in wide ascending circles, his wings twittering like a flock of sparrows, before plunging again to the earth. What if happiness were a pivot point you could occupy, even in the presence of unfulfilled desire? Would you try to make a fulcrum in your breast? Would you throw your voice as far as you could, and then go after it, secure in the knowledge that what goes up must come down? Would you haunt the brushy edges of the night?

March 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Last Supper

The first thing you need to know
is that it happens right here,
time & again. And also
that the heavens do not open

because they already gape as wide
as they will go: witness young Iscariot,
those stars in his eyes

about to go nova. He means to see
justice done, because somebody —
Tax collectors? Call girls? —
must pay for this profligacy. Ah,

there he is again, on the front page,
in black & white.
That corrupt bastard

who’s married to his wife. Well,
I’ve always been a straight-shooter,
he thinks, & raises the picture
to his lips.

March 17, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Legerdemain

I was dealt a singular hand, & learned
to do tricks with the light:
sun sugar, bittering
at an insect’s approach.
I donned a conjurer’s robe of air plants.
Below ground I have discovered
the prosthetic tooth of a glacier,
round & granitic, & I hold it
like hard candy in my mind,
that ultimate rope trick of rootlets
& mycorrhizal hyphae
that never quite touch.
__________

In response to the Read Write Poem prompt, “be a tree.” Other responses are here.

(UPDATE) Hyphae, also called mycelia, are the “roots” of fungi; mycorrhizal means they are symbiotic with plants. See here:

In the ectomycorrhizal symbiosis between fungi and trees, the fungus completely ensheaths the tree roots and takes over water and mineral nutrient supply, while the plant supplies photosynthate. Recent work has focussed on gene expression in the two partners, on the effects of global change and nitrogen deposition rate on the symbiosis, and on the role of mycorrhizal fungi in connecting individual plants to form a ‘wood-wide web’.

March 16, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Root

(Click photo to see larger version)

Mid-March at this latitude is a time when even the most ordinary things can seem like revelations, as the Theriomorph observes. There is both less and more of things than we remember. Upturned roots diminished by rot seem to draw sustenance directly from the clouds, while living roots on a stream bank eroded by floods are left clutching little but each other and a few, bare rocks. As we circle, examining them from all angles, these signs turn gradually into ciphers. Soon we risk our own entrapment in a spell of undiscovery. Did she really say, “Even the babies have rocks in their parts”? What does it mean?

(Video from the Undiscovery Channel)

A couple of housekeeping notes: I’ve introduced a Feedburner version of the RSS feed for this site, the main advantage of which is that it displays videos to subscribers. Sometimes, as with that skunk video in “Canoe Creek,” I forget to include a note or caption to tell people reading this via Bloglines, Google Reader, or wherever that there’s a video in the post. And why make them click through to view it, after all? Other advantages to the new feed include helpful links to share the post via email, Facebook, and so on, similar to what you have on-site with the ShareThis utility. I’ve made it the new default, meaning that it’s what you’ll get if you click on the little feed icon in the Firefox browser window.

And speaking of the browser window, if you’ve noticed a question mark inside a yellow warning triangle to the left of the URL, don’t be alarmed — that’s simply my new favicon. (Don’t like it? Design me another one!) It used to be an exclamation point, but it was subjected to rigorous questioning in Photoshop. If you can’t see the new favicon, and are still still looking at the old, nearly indecipherable one (which was supposed to be a “falling rocks ahead” sign, but looked more like a sideways “V”), that’s probably because your browser is still caching the old one. Don’t worry — you’re not missing much.