Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also Words on the Street.
Graves of the Unknown Dead, National Cemetery, Chattanooga, TN
William Henry Jackson, ca. 1900
such a noble sacrifice the forest made
in its battle with the saw
it deserves no less than a full plantation of stumps
erasers white with chalk
erected in loving forgetfulness
of the blackboard
a stone tossed into still water
always lands in the center of a target
of spreading years
how well we know them then
these unknown dead
Back to the Basics
A local bottled-water company describes its product as “mouth-watering.”
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Why Similes are the Most Common Poetic Device in Contemporary American Poetry
Well, like, Americans prefer similitude. Y’know?
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Context is Everything
The sign said, “Cut your own.”
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Going Native
As kids, whenever we were really bad, our parents would threaten to give us back to the Indians.
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Haploidal
In my past life, I was in two places at once.
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Remember This
A politician in hot water never says “I can’t remember,” because that might make him seem forgetful and incompetent. He says, “I don’t recall.”
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
Where does it hurt? asked the acupuncturist, and then placed the needles somewhere else.
*
It’s not that I have thick skin; I don’t. I just change skins often enough that names don’t stick.
*
So much of our lives are spent in caring for the dead — washing, drying, laying them out. Someday, when we too are dead, this will be our crowning glory: perfect hair at last!
*
It becomes evident with age that this parchment in which we live is being written on from both sides at once.
Who does the grouse think she’s fooling, leaving a line of arrows in the snow that all point back in the wrong direction?
What makes the bark of a growing maple lose its smoothness in concentric rings?
What do porcupines think about when they see the sun scale the sky?
Is that why they’re mostly nocturnal — they don’t like the competition?
Will the trees have any memory of winter, or is it just a big blank?
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In case you haven’t noticed the link in my sidebar, I have a new photo gallery. (Thanks to H. Rutherford for the idea.)
Today is the deadline to send tree- and forest-related links in for the upcoming Festival of the Trees. Email your submissions to kelly (at) ginkgodreams (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.
I just opened up my copy of Pablo Neruda’s El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions, a bilingual edition from Copper Canyon, with translations by William O’Daly) at random, and found this:
Cuánto dura un rinoceronte
después de ser eternecido?
Qué cuentan de nuevo las hojas
de la reciente primavera?
Las hojas viven en invierno
en secreto, con las raíces?
Qué aprendió el árbol de la tierra
para conversar con el cielo?
I can’t improve on Daly’s translation:
How long does a rhinoceros last
After he’s moved to compassion?
What’s new for the leaves
of recent spring?
In winter, do the leaves live
in hiding with the roots?
What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky?
El libro de las preguntas bears a strong, if superficial, resemblance to the 4th-century B.C. Chinese work Tian Wen, “Questions of Heaven” (which are really questions for heaven, though I’d be the first to agree that there’s something divine about the impulse to raise difficult questions). It too features riddles without answers, such as:
焉 有 石 林? Yan you shi lin?
何 � 能 言? He shou neng yan?
Where do the stones have their forest?
Which animals can talk?*
Of course, both books were written in the absence of internet search engines. I typed “question tree” into Google and found this intriguing sentence: This is a leaf Question in a boolean Question tree and its pointers to boolean operands are null values.
It occurred to me this morning that if I wanted to make the contents and purpose of this blog more readily apparent to first-time visitors, I could replace the Rene Char quote with something like, “Living with the questions.” But that’s not a question, is it?
__________
*I studied classical Chinese in college. I haven’t kept up with it, but the grammar is fortunately quite basic and I haven’t forgotten how to use a Chinese dictionary.
Steven Field did a translation of Tian Wen for New Directions, but I haven’t seen it.
Incidentally, if you see only question marks in front of the Pinyin in the two lines of Chinese above, that’s not me trying to be cute. It means you don’t have Chinese characters enabled in your browser.
In my dream I commanded giants, one of them natural, the other a robot. Their literal-minded loyalty terrified me. This is my sister, I said, protect her with your lives. But what could we do when the sky had turned to such implacable concrete? I woke to moonlight & an air so still I could hear a trickle from the measureless caverns under the front lawn.
Immediately after I turn on the computer, a pop-up appears with a minor fanfare of bleats. Symantec Security Alert: A remote computer tried to connect to your computer on a port commonly used by a Trojan horse.
So this is Troy! The armies at the gates are all Greeks, then, & we the barbarians, erecting barriers to foreign investment & the free trade in fictions launched from Olympus.
The make-believe conservative talk-show host asks the bestselling guru, Do you exfoliate?
And something else I heard yesterday that made me chuckle: a British friend describing the output of another bestselling author as monstrous twaddle.
The rain lets up.
A pileated woodpecker
hammers on my house.
Autumn for the trees
is a second springtime
for the rocks.
Four parallel lines
on the maple log
where the bear thought better of it.
This fall, once again,
I’m shocked to see how much the leaves
had managed to hide.
__________
Yesterday, when the rain eased up in the early afternoon, I took my camera for a walk down the hollow. For folks with high-speed internet access, here’s a ten-photo slideshow of the results. Dial-up users can browse the photos here.
Movie Review: Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story
The actor plays himself, the film unborn,
Stuck in the womb, unable to perform,
His fake proboscis forever out of joint —
A man of many parts but no real point.
All afternoon, the brown moth hanging head-down a few inches off the floor resists the advances of the house spider, beating her wings in a more and more restricted span as the spider adds thread after thread to the growing shroud. At the other end of the web, an egg sac the same color as the moth sways and trembles. The spiders soon to be born, the moth soon to be interred in a second cocoon — neither knows anything about their partner in this dance. Who’s to say we too aren’t joined to some unimaginable counterpart we’ll never meet?