Dave Bonta

October 26, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Want

This entry is part 27 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the ninth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

A Theory of Needs

I want what has been sliding
Toward me from the corners of the earth;
What the wind lulls along the early morning streets:
The dancing fit of history . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Bargain (antipoem)

The lead story in the business section of the newspaper the other day said
that Halloween now generates the highest retail profits of any U.S. holiday.
The labor news section of a newspaper in a parallel universe I sometimes visit
leads with a slightly different story:

DEATH NOW MADE IN CHINA
Components Manufactured in Mexico, Industry Experts Say

The article goes on to point out that Americans increasingly opt for
the convenience & everyday bargain prices available to them
in stores modeled after vast warehouses, where the economies of scale
& hefty taxpayer subsidies allow retailers
to make death more affordable than ever before.
In this alternate universe, advertising copywriters & public relations people
garner all the power and prestige afforded poets in our own society,
or griots & griottes in West Africa.
They author odes to sweet oblivion in all its disguises:
sex, drugs, saturated fats,
excitement, distraction, consumption.
We are holes, they sing. Fill us, fill us, fill us.
If I were one of them, I think I’d write a panegyric to the very fill itself,
that Clean Fill which – the crudely lettered roadside signs announce –
is always Wanted. Because in this much grimmer & grimier universe
in which I seem to be thoroughly enmeshed, all I can do is sputter
& wave my arms about like a moth stuck to the front grill of a truck.
I insist on raising embarrassingly sincere questions about, say,
the need children seem to have for some secret place –
a field grown up to thorns, maybe, or some beloved mess of trees.
An Unimproved Woodlot, the bards of the bargain would say.
Ripe for Development. Part of a tax-free
Opportunity Zone, where soon you’ll be able
to stop at the new Village Commons or Town Centre
for a Grande cup of Americano on your way to somewhere else.
A tricky place, this parallel universe: it’s hard to know
when you’ve arrived. One minute you’re there, the next you’re not.
I want to need to want to need to want, they chant, ad infinitum.
But most days that sounds like so much work! I’m glad I don’t live there –
though it can be, as they say, a nice place to visit.
There’s plenty of parking.
At the end of a long day, though, all I want is to put my feet up
for a little while before sinking into sleep,
which is, in this more humdrum & sadly impoverished universe,
still almost completely ad-free.
I need a new television, they tell me: one with High Definition,
whatever that means. I like the wildlife shows.
I don’t want to miss the minutest detail in those epic battles for survival,
those great escapes.
__________

Credit (or blame) for this goes to a post in Creature of the Shade, which led me to James Howard Kunstler’s newly blogified Clusterfuck Nation columns for the first time in months.

The deliberately unlyrical antipoem was pioneered by the 20th Century Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, and was characterized by “a sense of the unspeakable and a comedy shout,” according to Miller Williams.

October 25, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Pages from the memoirs of a lucky man

Hang on, they told me, but I didn’t. It was lovely, lying in the bed of the truck, to watch the tops of the trees passing overhead and imagine myself striding through the air on stilts like the feelers of a moth. Skating through the seamless sky: less like a Marvel Comics superhero than the one puzzle piece that just doesn’t seem to fit. That sad bit of misfortune the old-timers used to warn about: bad penny, wooden nickel, one thin dime. Shave and a haircut, we used to rap on any handy wooden surface, and pause to see who would be the first to succumb to the tension and supply the two concluding beats/bits. We called that, for some reason, the Queer Call. As if the essence of queerness lay in following the heart’s imperative rhythm instead of some disembodied Reason. But our revulsion at the prospect of being an automatic follower had other roots – and sounder ones, I’d say.

Spring and fall, our mountain was (and is) on a major migration corridor, and we spent many hours outside with binoculars, watching the hawks, vultures, and occasional eagle soar past. If any of those raptors had been telepathic, they might’ve felt our longing thoughts crowding in on crows’ wings – chasing, wheeling, diving with open beaks.

Vignette from the age of eight: After many hours, I suddenly recall the empty overturned flowerpot and the half-grown toad I had trapped inside. I race over and pick up the pot – and he takes a single hop. Well, what did I expect? Fairy tales to the contrary, a toad is never anything but a toad.

We collected things. In fact, my brothers and I opened a museum to show off our collections in the unused half of the building that also contained the chicken coop. For all the years of its operation, we fought a losing battle against the dust created by the constant scratching of forty hens and roosters in their straw bedding. It seeped through the walls and around the stapled plastic sheeting and settled on the florid conches, the trilobites, the horse skull, the antique winnowing machine, the rows of bottles we had excavated from the old farm dump. In less than a week, you wouldn’t be able to tell which whiskey flasks had been pale green and which – my favorites – had been made with that glass that turns more and more purple with age.

The one exhibit where this didn’t matter was the forest floor diorama. I had enclosed a weak spot in the shed floor with a sturdy wooden railing, then covered it with fallen leaves, a rotten log, and a couple of mossy rocks from up in the woods. I tossed in a crumpled Schlitz beer can for an extra touch of realism. This was the last stop on every museum tour, and for some reason it always made our visitors laugh.

“Say Uncle!”

“No! Get off me!”

“Say Uncle!”

“Owww! Uncle!”

Now that I am twice an uncle, I often think about this.

Once, I stuffed several monarch caterpillars and a bunch of milkweed leaves into a five-pound honey jar, pounded a few nail holes in the lid, set it down on the barn floor and promptly forgot all about it. Several weeks later I had to go in the barn for some reason, and there it was.

Admit it: you’re expecting some sad ending to this story, with a stern if unstated moral. But the truth is that, by sheer luck, there must’ve been just enough leaves in the jar, and I must’ve found it on the very day of emergence, because it was filled with nothing but sunlight and the flapping of perfect, untattered, bright orange wings. I carried it outside, unscrewed the lid and stood back. The butterflies rose from the jar in quick succession, danced together for a second or two and swirled apart, like a genie unbound by any obligation to serve a human being’s thoughtless wish.

October 25, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Just now

I open the Blogger “create” page and glance up from the table while it loads: snow! Fat wet flakes falling in my garden, on flowers that have somehow managed to persist without a frost almost to the end of October. With only one drooping blossom left per plant, the white shooting-star – a native of South America – suddenly looks stooped and awkward, like someone who has showed up at the wrong party, and is just beginning to realize his mistake.

Half-disappearing
behind a screen of falling snow –
drab autumn color.

October 24, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Grapevine

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A loop of wild grapevine out beyond the Far Field might be the oldest living thing on the mountain. It’s hollow inside, so there’d be no way to date it by doing a ring count, even if annual growth rings were discernible on grapevines.

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It’s as big around as my thigh – but there the resemblance ends. I can only dream of such a rippling, braided musculature. It arches briefly through the air, splits into three, and dives back underground with the grace of a dolphin.

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Notice how the light passes right through it. I should come here during a storm sometime and see whether it hums like an Aeolian harp. Who knows what prehistoric rumors this grapevine might pass along? Whatever trees it might’ve clambered over in its youth – tall chestnuts, perhaps, or cavernous white oaks – are long gone, replaced by a younger, weedier woods of black birch, black cherry, and red maple with a scattering of red oaks. Wild grapes have done well over the last two hundred years with all the clearcuts and disturbances here, given their habit of vigorous sprouting from root and vine. Last January’s ice storm opened up the canopy once again.

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Grapevines may lack the architectural genius of trees, but their flexibility in form and function makes them more adaptable, more able to weather changes. The tendrils know a thousand ways to curl and coil and twist – a habit to which this ancient, nearly rigid section of the plant seems equally predisposed. With us, too, great age can mirror infancy. But encountering something so long in tooth and so full of complex weather, it’s difficult not to feel that one is in the presence of a common ancestor from the late Cretaceous, when the rise of flowering trees called up the very first creature with a prehensile mind.

October 23, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Love: excerpts from a field guide

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Love, they would have us believe, somehow endures regardless of the season. The color merely migrates from blossom to leaf and from leaf to scalloped, over-wintering wing.

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What poets have traditionally celebrated is almost uniformly of a single species. Love when it is young and fresh indeed seems capable of making its own weather: green firmament, endless red moons.

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But love does age, like any living thing. It follows an arc. Sightless canes tap their way into the soil and take root. They become our flexible stunt-doubles; we, their brittle avatars of death.

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Love gives and gives until the tree stands bare and the ground lies thick with blowsy fruit. A doe and her grown fawn creep in at dusk and split them open with their hooves. I have stood outside after dark and listened to the grinding of methodical teeth.

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We draw together less for stimulation than for solace, now. In this damp cold season, the blues can come down, as they say, like showers of rain.

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The lucky chance that lies at the root of happiness seems all the more miraculous in the dwindling daylight hours, which by government edict we may no longer save. We fall back, trusting in the darkness that blurs and finally erases our sharp-edged grief.

October 21, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

The burden of becoming human

This entry is part 26 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eighth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Jacob and the Angel
by Paul Zweig

Like a dried husk, split into a grin,
I stood on the slope of a hill, and listened to
Something rising over the crippled acacia . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Hiawatha and Deganawidah

A pine knot exploded, & I checked the stew.
I saw my reflection among the floating bits
of what used to be an enemy
& that false face was yours, my prophetic friend.
You had helped yourself.

I heard everything then: the hissing fatwood,
flames licking the kettle’s greasy lip.
Two or three chickadees scolded through the open door.

I have been caught like that more than once,
among the pines & yellow poplars
in the next breath after some rare animal
has passed, fur rippling, out of sight.
The air seems fully open, like an undiscovered wound.
One hears distant voices of what may or may not be
other, ordinary walkers.

I stagger; you swing down from where
you had hidden yourself
among the rafters of the longhouse
& hold me up, show me how to make peace between
the factions in my body. Heart, spleen,
the insurgent belly – these separate fires all come
from a single ember, I intone on cue.

Then to dispose of the contents of the kettle:
let us dig its grave between the roots, you say,
in the legend that has already replaced my recollection.
There was never a fresh hole at head height
that leaked slow sap in the November sun.
There was never a cannibal feast.
When next we look in the revelatory muck,
you’re already flashing the antlers behind our heads
& I can’t account for the sudden leap in time.

I give you this epic, says the omniscient narrator,
what more do you want?
The shell beads dangle from his outstretched arms.
__________

Based on the Seneca legend recounted by Paul A. W. Wallace in The White Roots of Peace. The epic referred to is not Longfellow’s poem – a mish-mash of Iroquioan and Algonquin traditions – but the Great Peace (or Great Law) of the Iroquois confederacy, also known as the Book of Rites: equal parts epic and constitution.

October 20, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

At the Charles Simic reading

The aging soundman saunters down front to fiddle with the mike and won’t leave, mimicking the famous poet they’ve all come to see. With his bad posture and offstage clothes, it’s a travesty, compounded by a highly questionable accent. “Well, you know – ” he’ll say, and improvise another droll story about his supposed life in New Hampshire or childhood in Belgrade during the war.

A few stray pieces of paper and two or three books have been left at the podium, and he picks them up one at a time and peers down quizzically, as if addressing several exceptional frogs at the bottom of a well. He ends each poem – if that’s what they are – with an audible sniff and consults his watch. It’s the modern kind, he explains – it doesn’t tick.

The imposter’s grin never quite leaves his face. He holds up the famous poet’s most famous book – printed in large type, you see, so as to take more room on the page – and claims it’s nothing but a doodle in the margins of his memoirs. A likely story! It’s boring to describe what really happened. A writer always prefers to make things up. So you say.

The overflow audience crowds the floor, up to within an arm’s length of his feet. Many of them are here by choice, it seems, and would have every right to feel cheated, but only a few people get up and leave. He goes on for forty-seven minutes, stops, and takes a few tentative steps away from the podium as applause breaks out, mingled with appreciative laughter for an almost fully credible performance.

October 19, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Snowball’s chance

October’s theme for qarrtsiluni is Change and Continuity, which, as some readers may have noticed, I’ve been riffing on here as well. I submitted the following series of linked prose pieces, but on reflection, my fellow editors and I felt that it didn’t really hang together all that well; the third threatens to overwhelm the first two, and really deserves to stand alone.

This editing is a tough job, and we worry about the extent to which blogging has made us lax in the standards we apply to ourselves and each other. It’s a peculiar, god-like dilemma: how to be appropriately merciless and compassionate at the same time…

1.
I stood watching traffic and thought: a winch, a windlass. Some iron drum on a medieval instrument of torture, allowing pain to be administered in increments no thicker than an eyelash. That kind of wheel.

The day before, a friend of mine had been impossible to console: he had received two pieces of terrible news that morning, he said, and the one he was willing to talk about involved a young teenage girl in South Africa – the daughter of a woman he used to work with – raped in her own room by three masked men. “You know, there’s this persistent myth that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Preferably dry sex.”

I wondered about the other piece of news, but said nothing. We were playing cards, one of those games where the jokers can steal any identity and the player who finishes with the lowest score wins. I was winning, and whistled under my breath.

2.
In my last dream before waking, I am trying to find a poetry reading in a restaurant basement. Raw sewage is oozing through the cracks in the floor and under the stairs, green, incredibly foul. The manager shrugs: the health inspector won’t come around for another two months, and anyway, the city floats on a river of shit and stale urine. I find the exit and take deep gulps of the alley’s gentrified air. Here’s some fancy brickwork, an old brass hitching post. Every passing hand rests briefly on its cool metal skin.

3.
The news isn’t good, almost by definition. Polar icecaps are melting; the Amazon is drying out. All across Siberia, methane gas percolates through the warming soil, suddenly unencumbered by a frozen ceiling. Millions of years of freeze-dried shit and corpses have a sudden date with the anaerobic rulers of the planet, whose patience and whose appetite are equally infinite.

The wheel has turned too far, it seems, and now the ligaments are beginning to snap. In the long-term forecast, there’s an 80 percent chance of the extinction of most multi-cellular life forms on earth. Our ancestors were cold and lonely and desperately afraid of their own extinction, and read in the heavens a promise of unlimited semen. Now we will be plenty warm, I bet. And life will continue without us, in whatever form; those who believe in biogenesis can take comfort in the thought of earth’s own bacteria seeding the stars.

I remember once as a kid, toward the end of January, putting three or four snowballs in the freezer for some reason. I found them six months later while trying to make room for blueberries, and it took me a few moments to recognize what they were. The snow had turned to lumps of ice, gray and lifeless: such a fragile crop, impossible to preserve.

How will we describe the snow to our great-grandchildren? It drifted down from the night sky like flour, we’ll say, or sometimes like a rain of flowers the color of light: little vajras, wheels with six spokes. It gave cover to mice and to the ugliest of wounds. It made us dream of oneness. Wasn’t it cold, they’ll ask, and we’ll say no, you could burrow into it as into a down comforter. Sometimes a ruffed grouse would burst from the snow right in front of you in the middle of a still morning. It changed by the day and by the hour, and when the sun came out you could see the shadow of the sky itself: blue, blue.

October 18, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

When it breaks

This entry is part 25 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

A Fly on the Water
by Paul Zweig

I
It is eating me.
It is everything hungry in the world,
And wants me, and I’ll tell you, I don’t mind. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Qarrtsiluni

It isn’t death I dread, but the lidded coffin
& all that soil coming between me & the sky.

The earth is for living in, or under,
safe between the third and fourth ribs
of the great land whale.

Chewing the fat
with our boneless ancestors,
we could relearn the art of metamorphosis –
from the larval worm, how to wait
in the darkness for a stone
skin to split

& mixing dust & water,
bring clay to life with our own
perilous breath.

It isn’t death we fear, but the pain that precedes it
& this waking, all alone, in a strange bed.

October 17, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Thousand Steps

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There’s a place a few miles southwest of here called the Thousand Steps. It’s an old ganister quarry on the side of Jacks Mountain just north of the water gap known as Jack’s Narrows, named for an early settler who achieved great fame as a serial killer of his Indian neighbors. A narrow-gauge railroad on a steep, switch-backing grade hauled the quarried rock down into the Narrows, thence to the refractory in nearby Mount Union. Workers built the dry stone steps in the 1930s in order to make a faster commute.

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The steps climb a steep ravine where hemlock, Table Mountain pine, birches and maples have grown up in the more than fifty years since the quarry ceased operation. The old switchbacks make for convenient landings on which to pause and catch one’s breath. Since the acquisition of the Steps as part of a state gameland some ten years ago, they’ve become very popular with local people in search of spectacular views of mountains and forests and the winding Juniata, most poetic of all eastern rivers.

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Another attraction of the site is the fortress-like building that used to house the dinkey locomotives, made of the same stone as the talus slopes that surround it. An immense red oak tree stands directly below it; it’s easy to imagine the quarrymen resting briefly in its shade after trotting up the side of the mountain.

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Sunday was chilly – a good day to make the climb. Although the air was very clear, the sky was not. A pale mortar connected heavy blocks of cloud, sometimes gapping just enough to permit a brief view of the sun.

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Whenever that happened, cameras came out of pockets to record the instant transformations in the landscape. The few trees that had already turned color blazed like torches against the dark pines.

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The wind blew in strong gusts out of the northwest. Turkey vultures rose in tight circles above the Steps, catching whatever slight heat must still have been rising, despite the chill in the air, from all those open patches of bare rock. By the time we returned to the car, our legs felt like rubber from the long descent.