Epigrams and Conundrums – Page 9

May 8, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Band of gypsies

Eu amava o amor, essa lepra.
I was in love with love, that leprosy.
–Eugénio de Andrade, Matéria Solar

Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage,
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.

–Stanley Kunitz, “After the Last Dynasty”

The gypsy musician tells the interviewer that his favorite album growing up was by Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsies. He had a cassette copy that he listened to thousands of times. He liked it because it was so different from the traditional music his father played. He didn’t speak a word of English then, and had no idea what the title meant.

I don’t have a car. Lately, in my dreams, I have been running across train stations in the oddest places, all lit up and waiting for the railroads to come back. Some people are already buying tickets at the window. Homeless people are already moving in.

There were lilacs in the above photo, but I cropped them out. If you can’t smell them, what good does it do to see their image? The white in the background is the side of my parents’ house. If it weren’t out-of-focus, you’d see clapboard: about six inches wide near the ground, tapering to less than five near the roof – a trompe l’oiel effect designed to make the house look taller than it is.

You are all homeless – says the one god – with me. The thin whisper of a voice is lost in traffic.

April 17, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Three short poems to inaugurate a new pocket notebook

ravens
climbing into
each other’s sky
circling crying
out

above the road bank where
the hepatica has just come into bloom,
the corpse of a porcupine

carrion beetles clamber
through the quills

butterflies cluster on what’s left of its mouth
a hole spanned by the long, curved
railings of its teeth

& down below, the pale blue blossoms
swaying on their stems

On Easter morning, I took a plastic
envelope of ale yeast from the refrigerator,
placed it on the floor, & brought all
my weight down on it
to break open the enclosed packet of nutrients.
Within hours, the envelope had swollen up
like a sheep’s stomach
with afflatus from the resurrected yeast.

Now I will feed it malt & honey
& bitter herbs. It will pass
this brew through its multitudinous body
& turn it into beer.
The empty tombs of its spent cells
will drift to the bottom of the bottle’s
brown sea.

April 2, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Part of the solution

After weeks of drought,
rain falling in the night
smells so fresh:
wet leaves & ozone
& the soil coming to life.
I keep going outside
to pee off the porch.

March 26, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Problems for a short course in divinity

Suppose you wanted to crucify a tree. Would you nail it to the ground?

Suppose you could undo some violent event of your choice. Could you recover the future as it had been before that break in time, so full of promise?

Suppose winter were all you knew. How would you explain the shape of a tree, the arrangements of its limbs, the gestures of its twigs? Would you ever assume such an outlandish thing as a leaf?

Suppose you’d been educated in the darkness, like a druid. How would you explain the effrontery of laurel, holding up its little, waxen effigies of shadow in broad daylight?

Suppose you could change position from one moment to the next, but you couldn’t change where you’d been. How would conversion be possible? If you left your past behind you, what’s to convert?

Suppose you planted each nail with the idea that it might set root…

__________

For more questions – and a few attempts at answers – remember to visit the Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, most recently at Blue Texas and Velveteen Rabbi.

March 24, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Jetsam

From a blog on the other side of the world
comes an unblogly thing:
a piece of poem set in a concrete slab
at the edge of the sea, cast up on the rocks
like the sole survivor from a wreck of words,
or as if the poet’s voice, like Alberti’s,
couldn’t take fresh water in its gills
& had to be restored to its native salt.

Something about a poem in a public place
disturbs me. Every time I’ve spotted one
among the advertisements on a city bus,
I’ve had to look away. It’s like
surprising a couple in flagrante delicto,
or overhearing someone’s cellphone conversation
with their therapist. At least with a reading,
merciful silence follows, & the bare podium.

Then there’s this business of objectification.
Poems grow like agates in the dark,
each according to its own mysterious rules.
Like agates, they are common & impossible to market.
But marketing needs the claim of uniqueness
more than anything, so poetry
gets pressed into service to provide ballast
on the ship of foolish products & bland commodities.

Poets, however, are taught to value the concrete.
Seeing such weighty jetsam,
I conceive a sudden ambition for my own work:
to see it published up on the ridge
on some ostentatious boulder, enough in the shade
that lichens of every crustose & foliose form
would find my lines ideal for a slow, private,
thoroughly absorbing read.

March 15, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Questions for St. Isidore

Does the glass cactus bloom for a velvet bee?

If our days are numbered doors, does each door open on a different life?

Why did the coyote cross the road?

When they’re alone together in the broom closet, do the dust mop and the vacuum cleaner ever do the dirty?

Why must the poor always give more than the rich, who regard every gift they receive as a payment justly due, and every payment they owe as an unmerited gift?

Take a lesson from a Slinky: is life really an upward spiral, or a measured series of descents, ending in a snarl?

If you have too much time on your hands, does it spread down your arms like a luxuriant pelt?

Why should one walk the golden street in slippers? Why not in boots?

St. Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet.

March 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Iced fields

…While iced fields of the Milky Way look on.
Paul Zweig

Suddenly alluring, the world wears a bodysuit of ice.

All cast from the same ice, the flash mob revels in its perfect fit.

Whetted by the sun, a blade of grass springs free of its icy sheath.

Grass or glass? Glitter shatters underfoot.

February 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The blog in literature

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
Montaigne

I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
Melville

The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
Jane Austen

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
Jane Austen

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Mark Twain

We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
Mark Twain

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Charlotte Bronte

On day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. “What shall we do with them?” Her Majesty asked me. “The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the Records of the Historian.”

“Let me make them into a pillow,” I said.

“Very well,” said Her Majesty. “You may have them.”

I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.
Sei Shonagon

There is nothing in the whole world so painful as feeling that one is not liked. It always seems to me that people who hate me must be suffering from some kind of lunacy.
Sei Shonagon

Read you my epigrams? No, you burn
not to hear mine, but for your turn.
Martial (William Matthews, tr.)

If an epigram takes up too much space,
you skip it. It’s not substance you crave
but speed. I combed the markets for this spread
and you eat nuts and candied violets.
Fuss on your own budget, reader, and have
taste enough to salivate for bread.
Martial (ibid.)

The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about.
Shakespeare

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.
Dickens

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water â€¦ Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.
James Joyce

Yet he who grasps the moment’s gift,
He is the proper man.
Goethe

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Dickinson

Only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
Chekhov

February 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Scraps from the scriptorium

The morning starts out gray, dull as a stone in the driveway. “The stone is a mirror which works poorly,” Charles Simic once wrote. But mirrors of any kind bore me. They always give the same answer.

The structure of the wood must influence how the bark beetles excavate their galleries, I think. Is this the tree’s calligraphy, or the insect’s? I pore over my images with the intensity of a Medieval monk.

The sky starts to clear. Icicles formed by a waterfall’s spray dangle trumpet-shaped toes above the current.

A swayback mare and her foal graze at the edge of a snowy pasture. The rusty trailer, too, was once a blank white.

I spot a ribbon – the kind used to wrap presents – winding through the branches of a ridgetop oak. A balloon must’ve brought it here. The last blue scrap of it almost disappears into the sky.

January 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Under the sign of Janus

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The way the snow returns to the sky
is far more painstaking than the way it falls.
Near the end, it turns from ground to figure,
from canvas to paint. It scales the ladder
of its own self-effacement.

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So the snow withdrew into a clef-shaped cleft
& waited for its cue. This winter could go
either way.

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The witch hazel measured itself against an oak.
I want to be a tree, it sang, when I grow up –
A bird perch,
An insect metropolis,
A gallery of lichens above,
And below, a husband to fungi.

True, I am all these things already,
But not as a tree.