Dave Bonta

July 16, 2006May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Poems for a trip to the shore

Spanish-language poets never seem to tire of writing poems about the sea, and I never tire of reading them. Here are four favorites, freshly translated for the summer beach season. (Some of you may remember the first of these from a post back in March — The owl’s insomnia. I like my new version better.)

***

SONG (Canción)
by Rafael Alberti

If my voice should die on land,
carry it down to the sea
and leave it on the shore.

Carry it down to the sea
and make it captain of a white
ship of war.

Oh my voice, decorated
with the emblem of a sailor:
over the heart an anchor,
and over the anchor a star,
and over the star the wind,
and over the wind the sail!

***

THE SHORE (La orilla)
by Roberto Sosa

The great shore
gives shelter
to the smallest minnows.

Mother to boats and travelers,
she looks after that blue child the water.
She swallows hooks.

At night she sings, and the fishermen dream
of dragging the sea’s skeleton
back to their huts.

My little girl, my minnow,
this whole great shore’s for you.

***

THE LONGSHOREMEN (Los estibadores)
by Roberto Sosa

Yesterday’s courier and cross of rubble. From somewhere or other they came up with walls, docks and black ships. Boxcars that eclipsed the morning, the longshoremen already diminished by their bulky loads … even the ice was a form of outrage. Courier of yesterday — my father was one.

The breakers of late afternoon always subsiding, but still always rising up. To me, everything seemed to have grown dark — the tourist and the fisherman, the masts, the flotillas of gulls — all, all but the flying foam.

The workers on the docks went home to their cooking fires like failed angels. I was six, and dread was already dread.

***

Me at the Bottom of the Sea (Yo en el fondo del mar)
by Alfonsina Storni

There’s a house of glass
at the bottom of the sea.

It fronts on a street
of solid madrepore.

At five o’clock,
a fat golden fish
comes calling.

He brings me
a scarlet spray
of coral blossoms.

I sleep on a bed
just a bit bluer
than the sea.

An octopus
winks at me
from the other side of the glass.
In the green forest
all around —
ding-dong, ding-dang —
the sea-green pearly
sirens sing
and sway.

And over my head
in the twilight, burning,
all the bristle-points
of the sea.

In October 1938, Storni drowned herself in the ocean at Mar del Plata.

July 15, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Eggs

In the last village before the highway, oblivious to the danger of rockets, a young man pushes a cart loaded to the sky with white eggs.

In the other direction come lorries, loaded with shells, for Israeli tanks to launch into Lebanon.

I didn’t write that. It’s the last two sentences from a report by Nick Thorpe of the BBC. But I think it stands quite well on its own.

A couple of the pieces Beth and I have published in the current, short shorts edition of qarrtsiluni were actually rescued from old emails I had happened to save. I guess I’m always on the lookout for revelations, the briefer and more mysterious, the better. It can be difficult to set out consciously to create a good short piece of writing: like cooking a small fish, or pushing a cart full of eggs through a war zone, it takes a light touch. As Ben Zen says, there is nothing so unforgiving as the genuine.

We’re still actively soliciting contributions, by the way. Currently, we have almost enough material to make it to the end of July, but would like to continue through August, as well. Artists interested in interpreting the theme or accompanying a specific piece — as qB has just done — might want to contact Beth or me for suggestions in advance.

July 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Mushrooms

The mid-summer woods are dark and damp and full of mystery. Visibility is at a minimum. Things crash off through the brush without ever giving one so much as a glimpse. Strange calls issue from the throats of recently fledged birds.

Mushroom. It sounds like a good place to get polenta, or the last stop in an obedience school for sled dogs. Then too, it conjures up the effects of certain fungi on humans: ventilating the rooms of the mind with extra windows, say, or dissolving the liver.

Small patches of sunlight slide across the forest floor and disappear, re-appearing a few feet or many yards away. The photographer of mushrooms can either stalk these patches of available light and see what they illuminate, or find a potential subject and wait for the sun. Or, of course, one can forgo the sunlight altogether, use a tripod, and shoot in the gloom.

Me, I lie in ambush. I figure I’ll know my quarry when it comes.

July 13, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Spare parts

Here’s an old poem based on some emails from a woman I “met” about five years back through an online dating service, a very ambitious young Sharon Olds disciple. The “relationship” fizzled after about a month when it became obvious to her that I was more interested in talking about poetry than hopping a bus to her city for a weekend of heavy calisthenics. But she liked the poem, and seemed pleased that I chose to cast it in her voice, so I don’t think I do her any disrespect in reprinting it.

THE FUTURE POET LAUREATE WRITES IN HER JOURNAL

I’ve been so swamped, I took
a mental health day, called in sick.
My poems are dwindling like unused
extra fingers. But the signs
weren’t good: first the car
that wouldn’t start, then no heat
in the apartment. And in between
the therapist saying you have to learn
to let go. Hell, I barely made it
to the appointment. How can I relax
when my mechanic charges twice
as much as my therapist? I ask
the radiator repairman, can’t you fix it
so it doesn’t knock?
I need things to be simpler than they are.

Today my car still isn’t running
& I work eleven hours, 9:00 to 8:00.
After work I’ll rent an old movie
& fall asleep on the couch,
the tattered cushions will take me
as I am, will let me down gently
into their kingdom of spare parts.
I’ll weight my pockets with ballast of coins
& combs, let the missing socks stay missing,
pay no mind to the pens all sticky with ink.

July 12, 2006 by Dave Bonta

After the fire

Charred shell of an oak that the fire entered, snakes of flame darting through the logging slash, the wind turned poisonous: I was not there, only stopping by for the first time yesterday to see how the few trees left by the loggers fared in the May Day blaze.

We study crowns studded with the brown & shriveled remnants of leaves that budded out & started to grow, my friend tells me, in the weeks following the fire — as long as the sap already in limb & branch could maintain the illusion of life, like a sleepwalker trying to speak. The trunks still bear the forester’s blue mark that meant do not fell, save as a source of seed.

But this one — the one that stops us, appalled — never leafed out at all. The fire slipped into a hollow burl at ground level & fed on the heartwood, which had probably already acquired a certain predilection for the sweet & vastly slower flames of decomposition. The fire made a nest for itself in the spent shell from some earlier battle that the tree had managed to win, then ate its way back out through several new holes, burning a random sort of mask. You might want such a thing if you were acting in a play that included a role for Chaos, I suppose.

I give the charred wood a gentle kick, testing for weakness. It answers with a quiet boom, resonant like nothing living, tuned & tempered by the immense tree-shaped silence that continues above.
__________

For more on the May Day forest fire, see here [PDF].

If you have a blog, please consider writing a tree-related post for the next Festival of the Trees.

July 11, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Mizaru Bosatsu

After struggling to comprehend the needs of so many, his head split into eleven pieces. Amitabha Buddha, seeing his plight, gave him eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering.
Wikipedia, Kuan Yin

The Wikipedia article fails to mention that the eleventh head belongs to none other than Amitabha himself. I suppose you could say it was a meeting of the minds.

In Eurpean mythology, anything with multiple heads is invariably bad news. But then, Europeans were fairly unique; few other cultures were ever quite as removed from, and hostile to, the natural world. To me, the eleven-headed Kuan Yin iconography springs naturally from the botanical metaphor already implicit in the lotus seat.

In Japanese folk religion, though, the many-headed Goddess of Mercy has a Rabelaisian counterpart in the triune Monkey, made famous by its representation at Nikko. Lorianne had some fun with this icon in a recent post:

I had hoped to contribute ten self-portraits to the marathon, so I’m still one shy of my goal…but I have until midnight tonight (or maybe early tomorrow morning?) to post one more attempt.
Until then, though, I’m behaving myself, seeing, speaking, and hearing no evil.
Hoarded Ordinaries (see image)

Seeing a bodhisattva in a thousand-leafed rhododendron — what could be more emblematic of monkey mind?

July 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

What I saw when I was drinking

Yesterday afternoon, I drank up the last of my homebrew. Plummer’s Hollow will be dry until I get around to making some more. So it was a bittersweet occasion. Hell, it was a bittersweet beer.

But don’t be alarmed — I wasn’t drinking alone. I never do.

For one thing, there were the flies. Not the kind that bite, but the kind that just want to land on you and walk around a bit, pausing every few steps to rub your grime off their forefeet.

A good, strong stout should help you appreciate, you know, the little things: The songs of the birds. The weave of your jeans. The way you don’t feel anything one way or the other when you kill a fly, and you begin to wonder if that makes you a potential sociopath.

I got many glimpses of the chipmunk that lives in my herb garden as it hurried back and forth to its burrow, climbing tall weed stalks to get at their seeds and riding them down to the ground. I thought about my grandmother, who used to hand-feed chipmunks when she and Grandpa lived here for several summers back in the 1970s. In all likelihood, she fed this very chipmunk’s great x 30 grandmother. I can’t help feeling that creates a special bond between us. Not special enough to make we want to try hand-feeding it, but pretty special.

Through the slats on the porch railing, I had a good view of a crowd of garlic, though I wasn’t close enough to eavesdrop. People tell me I should decapitate them so their bulbs will grow bigger, but I can rarely bring myself to do so. They have such character! I love watching them uncurl, finally pointing their bills straight up like bitterns. And when their heads split open and the children within grow beaks of their own, I scatter them far and wide. Slowly but surely, I’m turning the lawn into a garlic patch.

From time to time, my eyes strayed back to the book on my lap: Jim Harrison’s The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. I was reading the section of poems called After Ikkyu and liking it pretty well. Harrison is a good drinking companion.

But mostly, I looked at the beer. As I mentioned, it’s homebrew, so I wouldn’t have to carbonate and bottle it. Three years ago, in fact, I left a couple batches in the carboy and just siphoned off a pitcher whenever I got thirsty. I don’t particularly need the mouth-feel of carbonation; I do it for the foam. What do wine drinkers look at? I’ve never understood that. Beer is beautiful.

__________

UPDATE: With the last photo, I meant to reference Dsida Jeno’s “Poem of Darkness,” which I recently became acquainted with thanks to frizzyLogic. True, Jeno himself mentions coffee. But what better than stout for a “dark and bitter drink” into which, “one dank brown evening,” to “melt and sink”?

July 9, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Old farm photos

The Children’s Picnic

Seven girls sit on the lawn around a picnic blanket. The year is 1919 or 1920, so of course they are all wearing dresses. They range in age from three to about fifteen. One girl wears a bow in her hair; she is six years old, and her name is Margaret. We don’t know the names of any of the others, because 81 years later, Margaret can no longer remember who they were. The teenager might have been her cousin Phyllis, she thinks.

The photographer takes three pictures of the children’s picnic, which will make it possible to pinpoint its location — on the lawn above the kitchen — even after eight decades have elapsed and almost everything has changed. In the background of one photo, a martin house and a large bell stand loom above the unfamiliar foliage. In the first two photos, the girls look stiff and serious — all except for Margaret, who grins impishly, at home here on her Great Uncle George’s farm. Then they go back to their picnic, raising spoons to their lips. The pet collie, whose name is Snap, appears as a blur of movement off to the left. Margaret’s eyes follow the dog; you can almost hear her calling for him to come. But he isn’t interested in joining this strange feast, which seems to include nothing but a small pile of oak leaves in the center of the blanket.

Charles in the Garden

Two-year-old Charles stands in a large patch of turnips, or perhaps rutabagas. Behind him, the barn is brand-new, painted a shade of darkness that must be red. Above the corncrib, rows of fruit trees where we have only ever known a field stretch all the way up to Sapsucker Ridge, which is dimly visible in the distance. In dreams, I sometimes visit another version of the hollow that lies right over a ridge we’d somehow overlooked, where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far — the way things looked when I was small.

Margaret’s little brother still has uncut, blonde curls and wears a long-sleeved white dress. He stands with his feet planted firmly in the garden path and grins at something off to the photographer’s left. With one arm raised he points high above his head, as if leading the ranks of turnips on to glory.

Light and Shadows

In the middle of the road below and to the right of my front porch, Jacob Plummer stands in his Sunday best with one hand on his hips and the other resting on the rear wheel of an open carriage. His wife Mollie sits up in the carriage holding the reins. They’re hauling what look like steel gates, or perhaps the springs for a child’s crib. The horse has his head up, clearly intent on getting back to the barn. At the top of the photo, a limb from the balm-of-Gilead polar tree that used to stand at the corner of the wall until its death in the early 1970s blocks much of the background. The bottom third of the photo is a double exposure. On the near side of the road, the sky starts over with much less balm-of-Gilead in it — a sky which, judging from the sharpness of the shadows cast by man and horse and carriage, must be a clear blue and not this barren field of white that we see.

Harrowing

The hired man and his son have paused in their harrowing of the freshly plowed field. It’s spring; the trees at the edge of the field still look skeletal, and there are splashes of white that could be shadbush. The newly emancipated stones have dried in the sun, making them clearly visible against the darker soil. The man is bearded under a floppy felt hat, and wears a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants held up by suspenders. In the first photo, the camera is tilted, making him appear to stand at an angle to the ground, like the gromon on a sundial. In the second photo, they’ve turned away from the photographer and gone back to work, the boy astride the left horse holding a switch, the man behind with one foot on the harrow and his hands on his hips as the iron teeth sink once more into the mountain’s thin red clay.

The Siblings

Richard is twelve, and doesn’t know what to do with his hands. In one photo, we see him in profile against a tree with his hands held stiffly behind his back. In another photo, he stands in the road halfway up the hill toward the barn with his hands thrust into the bib pockets of his overalls, frowning at the camera. In a third photo, taken at the same spot, his little sister has joined him. His hands have now disappeared behind the front of his overalls, elbows a little less awkward at his sides as he stares at the ground to his right. A straw hat nearly hides his new haircut. Margaret appears to imitate his posture, resting her weight on one leg and thrusting a hand into the pleats of her dress. The dog is nowhere to be seen. Stifling the vivacity that will carry her through nearly ninety years of life, she looks as grownup as she can, and gives her best impression of utter boredom.

July 7, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The web and other fables

Last Sunday morning I walked down the mountain to meet the woman we buy eggs from on her way back home from 8:00 a.m. mass. As I crossed the tracks, I heard her tires on the metal decking of the county bridge. She rounded the bend and stopped; a helmet with legs stood in the road between us. We hurried over and crouched on either side of it with our cameras, admiring the bright red eyes and orange markings and its apparent fearlessness as it continued on over the gravel and into the high weeds. However it had managed to survive to adulthood in the tiny strip of woods between the tracks and the river, it knew better than to look for sanctuary in the dark night of its shell.

Does place matter? Are online spaces truly analogous to real-world places? Do the connections we forge through blogging reinforce or compete with our connections to real-world communities and natural places? I emailed a bunch of blogger friends to get their opinions, and as you might expect, everyone had a different take on it. “What I like about place-specific writers (though I am definitely not among them),” wrote Siona, “is how I come away appreciating the nuances of my own particular corner of the planet that much more as a result.” Lorianne noted that for her main interest — nature writing — the blogosphere was a gold mine.

Whereas published nature writing might clue me into a handful of interesting (usually spectacular) wild places, place blogs allow me to check in on a greater number of places, most of them quite ordinary: places where folks actually live. Instead of seeing ‘nature’ or ‘place’ as being something that happens somewhere else away from people–Abbey’s deserted desert, Thoreau’s tranquil pond–I learn from blog-reading that ‘nature’ and ‘place’ transpire in the real world, in places where people are reading books & doing laundry & getting drunk & falling in love.

Below the old corral, I remind myself to quit walking so fast. Stop and look around, Dave! I take three steps back in the direction I just came, and a ruffed grouse family flushes from the weeds. The half-grown youngsters burst into flight, careening off to all points of the compass. The mother stays behind to do her broken-wing act, weaving drunkenly through the dry leaves and calling piteously. “Oh, stop your grousing!” I say, and she does.

Places are no less real for being imaginary, Beth wrote.

I think imaginary places have great power, and when we (on purpose or unwittingly) are presented with a real life substitute, the fantasy is diminished or even destroyed. I don’t much like seeing movies of books, for that reason, because I rather like the people and places who are created by my imagination when I read. In the case of REAL people (bloggers), the temptation to actually meet is too great, so it has been a tradeoff I’ve been glad to make. But I am sorry for some of the diminishment of the power of that virtual place and its inhabitants.

Marja-Leena offered a visual artist’s perspective, saying that for her, familiar blogs quickly become very place-like. It occurs to me that the element of evolution in a blog — the fact that it is constantly growing — adds to its feeling of spaciousness.

The black raspberries are ripening. The decline in our local deer herd has meant that, for the first time in over a decade, there are enough canes around the houses to yield a cup or two a day. I feel sorry for people who have to keep their lawns mowed, or feel that they do; it’s a nice feeling to be able to go outside and gorge on something one didn’t even have to plant. It’s odd, though: picking berries into a pot always seems like work, but eating them as I go, a handful at a time, is pure pleasure. I feel like a bear circling my house, glancing into all the windows.

Early in the discussion, I had mentioned that I didn’t think that immersion in online activity was such a great issue; the invention of writing systems had precipitated the original leap into abstraction, and that leap is still unsurpassed by anything that’s happened since. The blogger known as whiskey asked,

I want to know why it’s (potentially) unhealthy to live in an abstract state – as a writer, or as any kind of an artist? After all, it seems a bit of a prerequisite to live there, in the spaces between imagination and reality, memory and creativity, but is there really ever a conscious choice in the matter, or are we just drawn that way?

I think that creative individuals have a more heightened sense of reality – not in an abstract sense – but in the capacity to shift perception, to see otherwise, to move a little deeper in and out of what surrounds them than someone who stays on the surface of things.

To me, this is an infinitely healthier state, more flexible, less subject to rigidity and thus breakage. The benefits seem to far outweigh the risks – although it’s true that the risks take quite a few of us out. Is that pathological or is it evolutionary?

Several other bloggers answered, and a consensus seemed to emerge that, as Beth put it,

Abstract thinking […] can be informed by the concrete, day-to-day world, and our gift (I’d dare suggest) is to describe or translate the day-to-day world with added meaning because of that ability to think abstractly. So I think the two are best if in some sort of conscious balance, not that one is healthier than the other.

I get up from my writing and go out. It’s a beautiful morning, the nicest in a couple of weeks: clear and cool, like autumn in July. I climb the hill past the lilac bush — the path I take a dozen times a day. Just as I step onto the veranda of my parents’ house, a sunbeam passes through the front porch and all the way through the living room to light up a potted geranium that sits in the middle of a round table next to the door. This is its second blossoming, pink streaked with white, as obvious as a five-dollar whore. But the sun’s spotlight, filtered by several layers of glass, lends the flowers a brief, otherworldly radiance, and half a minute later, when it fades and goes out, I find I have forgotten whatever it was I came up for. Newly inspired, I go back down and return to my writing.

The email discussion began to ramify, making it difficult for me to keep track of who said what. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Dale weighed in about the importance of the quality of one’s attention, and questioned the relevance of “the natural” to our ability to stay focused on the present. Siona’s response resonated with me.

To me, physical embodiedness is a necessary part of attention. It’s all fine and good to examine the quality of attention from a spiritual or psychological point of view, but I somehow think that, unless the body is included, something is missing. And much as I’d like to think I can capture the same meditative quality in my squared-off office quarters, I know that unless the pores of my skin are soaking up the richness of a landscape, that unless the bronchii in my lungs are breathing in the respiration of plants, that unless my body is settled in the earth, where it belongs, there’s no way I can presume to be as present as truly possible. We are all connected to the planet, and the deepest present awareness, I think, demands this connection to “the natural.”

Other people jumped in to differ with or expand upon points already made. It occurred to me that, instead of using email, we should all be blogging and linking to each other. Only interconnected, hyperlinked text, with multiple nodes and no center, can begin to fairly represent a real-world conversation.

I went out for a walk one evening right at dusk during a break in the rains, and chose a foot path that winds through the hundred-year-old oak woods on what we call Laurel Ridge. The wood thrushes as usual were singing their heartbreaking songs. I started noticing mushrooms beside the trail, though it was hard to tell how many in the dim light. A deerfly found me and began blundering around in my hair. The humid air had a rank and fungal scent.

By the next morning, a cold front had blown in and the rains seemed to be over for a while. I took the path again, and was astounded. Yellow-brown toadstools were everywhere, pushing up the leaves, opening their cracked umbrellas. Here and there I saw amanitas and coral mushrooms, and clusters of Indian pipes — ghost flowers, as someone aptly nicknamed them — offered counterpoint to the lurid fungal display. I sat down on a patch of moss. It’s one thing to realize intellectually that a dense network of fungal mycelia extends for miles beneath one’s feet, and that without it, most of these trees could barely gather water or nutrients, but it’s another thing to see direct evidence of it.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualistic symbionts living in the roots of 80% of land plant species, and developing extensive, belowground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of soil nutrients and their transfer to host plants. Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect contiguous plants by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such hyphae may fuse due to the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition. […] The root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may be connected by means of anastomosis formation between extraradical mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of belowground fungal linkages within plant communities.
–Manuela Giovannetti, Luciano Avio, Paola Fortuna, Elisa Pellegrino, Cristiana Sbrana and Patrizia Strani, At the Root of the Wood Wide Web: Self Recognition and Nonself Incompatibility in Mycorrhizal Networks

Like an Internet user clicking on “page source” for the very first time, I sat uneasily among the fruiting bodies of the wood-wide web.
__________

For a much more thorough and academic look at the relationships between blogging and place, see Tim Lindgren’s paper, “Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs.”

July 6, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Of birds and bloggers

For the first-year anniversary of the bird blog carnival I and the Bird, its founder, Mike of 10,000 Birds, asked contributors to talk about why they bird, why they blog and/or why they blog about birds. Read the results here.

Some of Mike’s own thoughts should be of interest to anyone who blogs (or who simply reads blogs), especially if they’re wondering what the deal is with carnivals.

Someone one said that happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length. I suspect that principle applies to many other emotions, including enthusiasm for blogging. This is a tough business, particularly because it’s not a business at all. Very few people are making decent money off the sweat of their brows here in the blogosphere, but lots of bloggers will tell you how heavily they’re sweating. Productive, effective, consistent writing on any topic is demanding work. So what’s the payoff? Where is the inducement to stay at it when other demands loom large? I think most bloggers feel rewarded by recognition and connection. More readers satisfy the former while the respect of our peers, hopefully manifested in the form of links, provides for the latter. So, it stood to reason that if I wanted to see my favorite bloggers continue to offer up top notch content for free while encouraging others to get in the game and do the same, I had to do my part to deliver readers and links. That, my friends, is what a carnival does.

If the new Festival of the Trees enjoys even a tenth as much success as I and the Bird, I’ll be satisfied.