Dave Bonta

March 26, 2007September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The cloud of unmaking

Inside the cloud there were trees, there were woods and fields, there was an entire mountain where the last few patches of snow had shrunk in the wash, so that the ground was now almost entirely bare.

Inside the cloud, ants and woodpeckers went about their business of excavating chambers in the heartwood. Things seemed at first as they should be. But the ground, too, grew hollow from the ministrations of earthworms, the descendents of hardy pioneers, slowly unmaking the land and everything that sprouted from it. The dark red stems of Japanese barberry glistened against the yellow fur of last year’s Japanese stiltgrass.

Inside the cloud, rain didn’t have far to fall. But it brought nitric and sulphuric acid from power plants a hundred miles to the west. Evergreen leaves of mountain laurel turned beautiful shades of brown and red and copper before falling. Trees slowly weakened as the acid dissolved the minerals and nutrients needed for their growth, and left a soil saturated with aluminum. This effect was especially pronounced inside the cloud, which was more acidic than rainfall alone would have been.

Inside the cloud, trees made vulnerable by acid deposition succumbed to a thousand different enemies: diseases new and old, native or exotic pests. A warm winter allowed insects to flourish; a cold winter killed weakened trees outright. Weedier tree species such as black cherry and red maple took over from the oaks and hickories, but were much more likely to snap in the increasingly frequent ice storms. The forest slowly took on a patchy appearance, turned to savanna. The fallen trunks and branches bubbled with white fungi.

Inside the cloud, colors that had lain dormant all winter began to glow. Spring would come one way or another. Even if someday all flowering plants should die out, something would still brighten and appear to blossom. Something would still license the simulacrum of hope.

Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to roger (dot) butterfield (at) gmail (dot) com by March 30 for inclusion in the upcoming Festival of the Trees at his blog Words and Pictures.

March 24, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Luckier

It sounds as if the kitten I posted about a few days ago is quickly adjusting to his new home (yes, she is a he — shows how much I know about cats). Read all about it here and here. Suzanne also tells me that he has learned how to use a litter box, no problem. Hard to figure why his original owners dumped him, but everything seems to have turned out for the best.

March 24, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Neanderthal

The young girl on TV is shown at the moment of realization. Run away, run! she had been shouting at the wounded hairy thing as it foundered & went down in a circle of men with spears, & now she is turning a heartbroken face to the cameras from the future, she is calling down destruction on her own kind, because we did not see as clearly as she did that these too were people. She is saying, when the last of the others has been killed, there will be no one left on earth. How can you live without dreams? She is saying, we are all others after dark.

March 23, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Retreat

Bright idea of the moment
A retreat for qarrtsiluni contributors, somewhere in North America, sometime in 2007

What we would do
1. Sit in the darkness, wait for something to burst
2. Blog about it

Reactions?

March 22, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Finish Line

I’ve never written in response to a Poetry Thursday challenge before, but this week it was ekphrasis — just like the current theme at qarrtsiluni, the literary blogzine I help edit. So how could I resist?

This fairly inconsequential little poem was written in response to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Judy W, from this post at Elegant Thorn Review.

The secret to us
staying together, I said,
is just not to think
about the finish line.
You got to keep your eyes
on the road. Out by
the speedway, we found a bench
with all of its slats intact.
The roar of the cars & the crowd
came in waves, like the ocean.
You could smell the exhaust.

We had everything with us,
but it wasn’t enough for her.
You go on, then, I said.
I was already carving
our love into the wood,
but stopped before the plus sign
& her own six letters.
I don’t want to miss
this chance, I said.
One of those waves
isn’t going to stop.

[Poetry Thursday – dead link]

March 21, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Spring in the sticks

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
–Robert Frost, “A Prayer in Spring”

First day of spring —
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.
–Matsuo Basho (Robert Hass, tr.)

Dead sticks
have no spring

March 20, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Save Lucky

“Why are people such heartless jerks?” this kitten might be thinking — but she isn’t, because she is the most cuddly, affectionate, purr-fect little snoogie-woogams you have ever seen!

“Is this the Apocalypse?” you might be wondering, because you never expected to read the words “purr-fect little snoogie-woogams” at Via Negativa. But look, I need to get rid of this cat. And I don’t feel like dealing with the Humane Society, who always hit us up for a donation and act as if it is our fault people like to dump their four-footed problems off at the entrance to Plummer’s Hollow. Somehow or another, Lucky here managed to make it all the way up the road on her own, through the ice and snow — and happened to find a bunch of a gun-toting bird-lovers in a charitable mood. (It helps that we had a gallon of sour milk to get rid of.)

See what an appealing little kitten this is? Do you really think she needs to die in the jaws of a coyote or the talons of a great-horned owl — or from a lethal injection at the local Humane Society? What has she done to deserve such a fate?

Please help her live up to her provisional name and spread the word: Lucky needs a home. I wasn’t kidding — she really is very affectionate. I’ve seen her catch a fast-moving small rodent (a meadow vole), so she’d probably make a good mouser. And she seems to know how to act around small children. Truly, a wonderful animal.

UPDATE: We appear to have a taker (see comments). In fact, Suzanne responded within 15 minutes of my putting up this post! Who needs the classifieds?

March 19, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The bottom corner

I am trying in secret to set the field on fire. It’s going to rain. I crouch down with an old book of matches I found among my grandmother’s things. The head of the first match I try crumbles into white sand against the strike pad. The second, drier, pops and flares into life. I hold the flame against the wiry blond curls of dried grass and it catches, races up one blade and down another. A thin pencil of smoke. My brother spots it and comes running over. “What are you doing?” I tear another match from the book, and another. The first fat drops begin to fall.

That was a dream, but it got me reminiscing all the same. There were wild dogs on the mountain back then. The one we called the Red Dog whelped a litter in an old woodchuck den down in that same corner of the field, and then abandoned them when they were half-grown. She never seemed quite right in the head, and some of her pups didn’t, either. We tamed them one by one, running them down in the long grass and when we caught them, petting them for hours and crooning words of endearment. I remember the beagle-looking one I frightened so badly he pissed himself, so that forever after he would urinate wildly whenever he was excited, until the family that adopted him finally took him to the pound. The one my brother Mark befriended developed a taste for chickens and had to be shot. That’s a hard thing for a 4-year-old kid to take, especially one with two domineering older brothers and no close neighbors. He said later it bothered him for years.

Early on, my parents wanted to have a pond down in that corner of the field, but the contractor decided it wasn’t clayey enough to hold water and left us with just the test holes. One of them quickly silted in, but the other was next to a spring and remained filled for much of the year — the pond, we called it, though it was barely more than a puddle. A few times we brought a microscope down and spent hours peering at algae and microorganisms. And every March during wood frog mating season we’d sit motionless beside the pond for hours, listening to the strange chorus of quacking calls and watching the orgiastic pile-ons whenever a female showed up. It was an education.

Once when we were teenagers, Mark and I went down into that part of the field with every book about wildflowers, weeds, grasses and sedges that we could lay our hands on, trying to attach a name to everything we found. We almost succeeded.

You must understand: we didn’t have television.

That section of the field hasn’t been plowed now in probably 40 years, and it hasn’t been mowed in over 30. Some catalpa trees have seeded in, and a few black locust, but other than that, the over-abundant deer have prevented trees and brush from taking over. We planted some white pine seedlings about ten years ago, but the deer got those, too.

Down under the grass and goldenrod, a thick carpet of moss has built up over the years, dotted with clumps of ebony spleenwort and cutleaf grape ferns; you sink in with every step. It’s nothing like walking in a pasture or a plowed field. This is the kind of spot that can haunt your dreams.

March 18, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The Owl

A large owl glimpsed
in flight at the edge
of the spruce grove,
wings clipping against
the locust saplings as
it drops from its roost
& glides down the hillside
through trees as brown
as its feathers, a glare
off the snow & above,
the deepest blue:
I think of it again
just as I’m falling asleep.
The wind is shaking the house,
& I am wondering if this
is what it feels like
to be happy.

March 17, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Forward, March!

Four days ago the snakes were out. Now once again we have snow, we have abstraction, we have calligraphy. But this is not a step backwards, as so many people like to think.

The water in the stream looks black because the snow is white — this was true even before I upped the contrast in post-processing. Winter is about nothing if not contrast. And during no other month are the contrasts as sharp as they are in March, at winter’s end.

The dance between winter and spring is well underway. Mourning doves are pairing off, and the sharp-shinned hawks are wickering in the depths of the spruce grove. The woods echo with the calls of red-bellied woodpeckers.

Certain dried weeds from last autumn remind me of wildflowers that will be blooming in another two months. The seed capsules of one unidentified weed in the hollow this morning, for example, were reminiscent of yellow mandarin blossoms. And the arrangement of leaves on the stem of the weed above reminded me of Solomon’s-seal, though I very much doubt that’s what it is.

A common grackle foraging in the stream made me think for a moment that the Louisiana waterthrush had returned a month early, though there’s no mistaking that baleful eye.

This may well be the last snowfall of the year, so I took special note of all the tracks. In one place, a vole had left a complex arabesque of tunnels in the top two inches of the snow. A little farther along, I saw where a chipmunk had made a very brief foray out from its burrow. And up near the top of the hollow, a winter cranefly strode purposefully over the snow without leaving any tracks at all.