Self-portrait in proverbs

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

 

frost hand
Click on image to view the full-size version

A footprint is a sign; a handprint is a message.

This one says: I choose transparency because that’s the best way to hide.

Solitude is a salt lake with five inlets.

Sand can return to stone, but can glass ever return to sand?

My hand was so thick, I couldn’t see the fog in front of me.

 

tree face

 

Ice is a form of immobility that doesn’t keep. By the time I got my photos of the ice storm home & took them out of my camera, they had already lost almost all their glitter.

When the sky falls, it clings to everything. Trees snap with the weight of it. Beauty is best kept at arm’s length.

If it weren’t for wonder, I might have to go make something of myself.

Trees in the winter aren’t sleeping; they’re procrastinating.

Always remember that nature is out to kill you.

__________

Inspired by the posts at the communal self-portrait site Autography (tagline: “Self-Portrait as Story”).

In the used bookstore

I am eavesdropping as I browse the poetry collection. If anyone notices, I’m sure they’ll assume it’s book titles I’m scribbling into my warped pocked notebook, which is on brief, temporary work-release from the depths of my winter coat. I didn’t have heart trouble until I married you. Then I had heart trouble. I peak around the books: seated at a round table in the café, an elderly woman is lecturing her husband as a middle-aged man looks on, appearing to mediate.

I recall suddenly my last dream before waking, in which a yellow-billed cuckoo was being eyed by a great-horned owl. First I was on the ground looking up at the cuckoo, thinking raincrow, and then I was right with her on the branch looking farther up into the canopy at the owl, and feeling the cuckoo’s terror as the owl spread its wings menacingly.

Some new, small-press titles on consignment grab my eye. Backwoods Press, or something like that. I recognize the author from an anthology — he’s good. I read several poems, carry the book over to a table, sit down with it, read a couple more. The poor printing and mediocre design finally get the better of me. I carry the book back over and continue browsing. It occurs to me that the dream must’ve come from listening to several versions of the old Anglo-Irish folk song “The Cuckoo” the day before.

Look how shakey he is! His fingernails need cut and I can’t cut him. Last time I tried to cut his fingernails, he got cut. I tried to take him over here to get them cut, but he won’t go! He’s too damn stubborn. I pick books off the shelf that I know I’ve looked at before, on past visits, read one or two lines and put them back. I start feeling self-conscious about it, because now I’m taking notes.

Would I browse this way in a library, I wonder? No, I don’t think I would. In a library I tend to give books more of a chance. But in that case I’m only looking for temporary guests; here in the bookstore I’m looking for long-term companions. And it’s just common sense to be extra careful about that: so many minor irritations, if improperly indulged, can grow into pet peeves that require regular walks and the changing of litter boxes. One lapse of judgment and there you are four short decades later with heart trouble or shaky hands.

On the bookstore’s stereo, a rockin’ calypso version of “No More Monkeys Jumping On the Bed.” I find a book I like: Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems by David Huddle. It’s a good-looking paperback from Louisiana State University Press, and I know I’ve looked at it before without reading more than one or two lines. This time, I read six poems in their entirety and am hooked by the straight-forward narrative style and details of rural working-class life. The Ben Shahn painting on the cover, Blind Accordion Player, may or may not have been a factor. I tuck it under my arm and head for the counter. The notebook goes back into its burrow in my coat for six more weeks.

Out of place?

red-tailed hawk with vole

According to a helpful webpage on film sound clichés, “the Red-Tailed Hawk scree signifies outdoors and a big, lonely place.” Anytime a rocky mountainside appears in a movie, you can almost count on hearing that raspy scream, which most people probably assume belongs to an eagle. It’s also used as an all-purpose signifier of impending or just-concluded drama in the typical outdoors adventure flick. So you know that I must’ve photographed this immature redtail in some wild, lonely setting, right?

red-tailed hawk in maple

Wrong. It was hanging out in the heart of Penn State’s University Park campus yesterday, home to some 40,000 students. Which, I suppose, is positively bucolic compared to Manhattan, where Central Park’s famous Pale Male lives, along with a growing number of other redtails. As I watched, the hawk dove at squirrels on the sidewalk four different times without success: fat and pampered as they seem, Penn State’s squirrels are masters of defense, dodging and feinting. It finally dove into the groundcover next to Schwab Auditorium and came up with what appeared to be a meadow vole, whose presence on campus I found much more surprising than the hawk’s.

By this time, classes had let out and the sidewalks were jammed, but most of the students didn’t appear to notice the hawk ripping at its prey on a low limb less than ten feet above the sidewalk. Half a dozen students had been following the drama with interest, and a few more, seeing all of us, paused briefly to snap pictures with their cell phones, but the vast majority didn’t give it a second glance. In fact, when the hawk dove after the vole, it cleared the head of a passing student by less than three inches, but she never looked up.

red-tailed hawk in elms
It seems ironic that I have to go into town to get good views of wildlife that we have here on the mountain in abundance. I’m reasonably sure our resident redtails have never been shot at, but they are still far warier than this one was. Nor is it the first time I’ve seen a hawk on campus acting as if people were nothing but short, loud, ambulatory trees.

The students who took an active interest in the hawk’s activities were as puzzling to me as those who glanced at it and kept walking. I gathered from their conversation that at least a couple of them had been following it around for close to half an hour by the time I came on the scene. “It sure beats going to class,” I heard one of them say. But they weren’t disinterested wildlife watchers; I soon realized that they were actually trying to herd squirrels toward the hawk. Each time it dove at a squirrel, they hooted and cheered like football fans at Beaver Stadium.

They made an odd counterpoint to the half-dozen crows, who were watching and jeering from a somewhat safer distance in the tops of the elms. But within minutes after the hawk finally scored, both the fans and the opposing team drifted away. I stood alone on the auditorium steps, watching this strange and magnificent creature tear its brunch into bite-sized pieces while students streamed by below. A couple of times it paused to return my gaze with that challenging stare all raptors possess, and I felt a little odd — as if it were really I who was out of place. What was I doing, thinking that the human-nature dichotomy is an out-dated construct only adhered to by a few, misguided purists? The hawk might as well have been a visitor from another planet.
__________

Be sure to check out the short-but-diverse Festival of the Trees #20. And if you have any broader interest in plants, you may be interested to learn that there’s a brand-new blog carnival for plants called Berry Go Round. The first edition is up at Seeds Aside.

Wind power: four movements

turbine

Allegro

Out on a sailboat
secure in her windbreaker
she enjoys being buffeted so much
that her husband grows sullen & points
the boat toward shore

*

Andante

The wind took all my money
& threw it
in the gutter
says the poplar tree
& I’m left swaying like an idiot
with my arms still up

*

Adagio

He came home from Afghanistan
& couldn’t find the mountain at first

old Backbone Mountain had shrunk
almost to nothing

pinned down by 400-foot turbines
moaning through the night

*

Largo

Stiltgrass spreads like cancer between the pylons
a green feathery shroud for the clumps of feathers

the beaks & talons
blue as old ice

the delicate finger bones of forest bats
stripped of the brown parchment
on which they flew

What profit hath he
that hath labored for the wind?

& overhead the bone-white blades scything the air

__________

For more on the ecological and social impacts of industrial wind plants, go to windaction.org and browse the important documents section.

Polyporous

black birch with Polyporus betulina fungi

Betula lenta, “pliant birch tree.” It’s true: a black birch is almost always more resilient than a white one, more likely to straighten back up after bearing a translucent burden of ice. Only in death does it lose its give and become rigid with listening, all its ears turned downward for news of the earth.

For more winter fungi, see A Passion for Nature‘s fungi category. Jennifer’s even putting together a book on the subject.

God of Wealth

Fushimi Inari Torii
Photo by Fg2 — public domain

From the train station all the way up the hill, sacred gates are lined up like hollow dominoes. We are the spots, our pale acquisitive faces bobbing atop suit coats & kimonos. Vermillion, the color of success is vermillion, & it hurts our eyes.

As we near the shrine, we hear the tin hail of one-yen coins, which are minted for no other reason than to feed the bottomless stomachs of the offertory boxes. And that splashing sound is no fountain: every day, in the name of purity, thousands of mouths are washed out with the same few dozen bamboo dippers. We take them from the hands of strangers with the slightest of bows. Water is the earth’s own currency, & we swallow with reverence. Our words must be clean when we speak to the god, even if the tongue barely twitches in its lurid cave. Our desires must be pure as pressed rice.

I’m here to accompany my homestay family, whose eldest son is about to take a high school entrance exam, but they encourage me to pray, too. “Whatever you want the most, say it in your heart. Use pictures! Inari won’t understand English.” Indeed, I am the only foreigner here. It may be a major shrine, but tourists prefer thousand-year-old temples from which the last traces of paint have long since faded away, & where the aesthetic of enlightened poverty reigns unchallenged. What do I want? I go through the motions, clapping my hands to get the god’s attention. A white fox flickers in my mind’s eye.

Big Buddha

Buddha is bigger than you. His scalp is great with child, & his patriarchal breasts bulge with dharma-milk. His arms multiply exponentially like the mother of all Swiss Army knives, & he juggles odd objects: fly whisks, vajras, capacitors, USB flash drives. The Buddha is bigger than you, and easier on my wallet. I found him at the landfill & brought him home & placed him on top of the television, & he’s been growing ever since. Now I can tune in the weather from Colombo and Phnom Penh. The Buddha is bigger than you, & whenever he touches the earth with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand, shit happens. Under those rust-green robes, he’s got an Elvis tattoo — don’t ask me how I know this — & the balls of a brass monkey. Like the number zero, he is both real & imaginary. Ask him anything! He rings when struck.

Prompted by (but not based upon) Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s short film “Daibutsu” at qarrtsiluni.

An instinct for beauty?

mourning doves mating
Photo by Joby Joseph (Creative Commons)

Do animals other than humans have the capacity to appreciate beauty? I’d be surprised if they didn’t. There are, after all, elephants who have learned to paint, which seems to be simply an extension of a natural impulse to draw: “Unprompted, an Asian elephant in captivity will often pick up a pebble or stick with the tip of her trunk and casually doodle on the floor of her enclosure.” It’s hard to imagine how improvisational singers such as mockingbirds or brown thrashers could produce compelling sequences without a strong instinct for what sounds good with what. But I’ve always considered mourning doves to be kind of brainless, for some reason, so I was a little surprised this morning to observe two pairs of them apparently watching the sunrise. One pair was already perched in the top of a tall locust tree at the edge of the woods when I came out onto the porch, and another flew up to a lower branch shortly afterwards. Neither pair stirred for the next twenty minutes, as the rising sun bathed the western ridge in red and orange light below the setting moon.

You have to understand that it was cold this morning — 10 degrees Fahrenheit, or -12C — and there were plenty of other places they could have perched which would’ve provided much more shelter. And they were facing into the wind.

Of course, that’s only four doves out of a flock of several dozen; most of the others were, I presume, already pigging out on cracked corn below the bird feeders up at the main house. Lord knows, they probably needed the calories. But maybe, as with humans, it’s only a small percentage of the flock who prioritize aesthetic experience over more basic urges.

Then again, the doves watching the sunrise were doing so as couples, so really, it might all be part of extended courtship or pair-bonding behavior. And who’s to say which urges are the most basic, really? Aesthetic response is, after all, pretty integral to the whole mate-selection process. If females didn’t use aesthetic cues when choosing a mate, sexual dimorphism wouldn’t be nearly as widespread as it is in the animal kingdom (though competition for mates apparently isn’t the whole reason why one sex — usually the male — is more colorful or larger than the other, and mourning doves themselves are not highly dimorphic). The hunger for beauty registers in the body as well as the mind, and is so much a part of the way we experience being in the world that it hardly seems possible to isolate an aesthetic impulse from among the whole range of animal instincts.

the morning porch

Incidentally, if you’ve been enjoying The Morning Porch, here are a few other blogs where brevity is key to the aesthetic effect:

  • a small stone, by British poet Fiona Robyn
  • Once around the park, Clare Grant’s 30-word descriptions of her daily walks in Tunbridge Wells, UK
  • Three Beautiful Things, by the same author
  • box elder Out with Mol, where Lucy Kempton has also recently begun writing 30-word posts [updated 2/3/08 to link to Lucy’s new blog, spun off from box elder]
  • Now’s the time, Joe Hyam’s daily “three things” blog
  • tinywords, “the world’s smallest magazine, publishing one new haiku nearly every weekday since late 2000”
  • The Natural History of Selborne — not the text of the first-ever synoptic nature book, but the raw material from which it was made: Gilbert White’s journals. The entries are rarely longer than thirty words.

Tom Montag’s “Lines” series of poems from The Middlewesterner are also almost always very brief. I’ve been collecting my favorite posts from other Twitter-users here. And finally, qarrtsiluni‘s Short Shorts issue from July-August 2006, which featured prose and poetry of 100 words or less, is fun to revisit now and then.

Call to Prayer

Flame tree, smoke tree, a sky like sandpaper. Mobile phones have been programmed to issue the call to prayer: God is great. A man grazes horses where a lake used to wrinkle in the breeze & stares into the dry cup of his hands five times a day. God is great. The future has been recalled; too many people were dying of natural causes. All weather will now be provided by the private sector, they tell us, as trees belch with flame around the ancient temple of Artemis. I bear witness that there is no God but God. Lines of footprints in wet ash tell a story, but not ultimately a very interesting one. The wonderful thing about movies is that they are always true. I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of God. Here you can see where lizards went on pilgrimage to a puddle of water, steering with their tails. Here you can see where the toymaker’s assistants have been poaching charred olive wood. Hurry up please it’s time for prayer. Notice how the shadow grows smaller & blurrier as the bird gains in altitude — hard to say at what point it’s gone completely. What kind of bird? The black-diamond tail makes it a raven, I guess. The point is that weather-related incidents may no longer be ascribed to acts of God, thank God. Hurry up please it’s time for success. And if that’s the case, someone must do something about the suddenness of nightfall in the tropics & those ridiculous short days we have in winter, where applicable. It has been duly noted that the naked Germans on the beach are happy with the extra sun, although the locals are not: God is great. Flame tree, smoke tree, a sky like alabaster now that the last contrails have been delivered to the museum of blueprints. Ah, & the boys from the village are stalking grasshoppers with wooden machine guns. There is no God but God.

Travesty

black birch

This dance they do
it turns them into holy caricatures
the clowns proclaim that up is down
& the end justifies the beans
everyone drinks until they see
two of everyone
& their arms shake
unable to choose which
delightful lie to lay
& hey
this year even us USians can imbibe
because Carnival reaches
its riotous climax
on Super Tuesday