What if every mirror had a dragonfly in it?
What if after years in the mud we graduated not to swimming but to flight?
What if the ground were as translucent as the water, & every step brought us closer to the sky?
Rat Snake
Rat Snake from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.
Several times a year, a black rat snake climbs the black walnut tree out back to get in my house and eat the rodents, for which I’m grateful. This video poem depicts its latest entrance.
(Transcript)
We were just talking about you crooked tunnel
the way you funnel your long freight up the walnut tree serpent
& glide out along one diminishing limb until you reach the roof
drop into the gutter & loop into a squirrel hole above the kitchen
We’d just found one of your old skins snagged on a thorn
I don’t think he’s coming back for it I joked
And my neighbor glances up into the tree & says
Well there he is now
And there you were son of a bitch
still & heavy as a tongue with bad news
waiting for a signal neither of us caught
to set you back into motion into path into limbless dragon
flicking your soft Y of flame
*
Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts and photosets to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival, which next month will be hosted for the first time by an India-based blog, Trees, Plants, and more. Details on how to submit are here.
Outside the box
Outside the box, Jack is a weary drunk, a crashing bore. Earwigs menace him with their calipers. Outside the box, Joseph Cornell steps carefully into the legs of his corduroy pants & into a pair of penny loafers & into a car with (he always thinks) three doors too many. Outside the box at dawn I heard a gunshot & wondered briefly what prisoner had met his or her end — some black angus, probably, with a barcoded label stapled to his ear. Outside the box, we are accustomed to living without hope; the other vices are in any case a far throw more entertaining. A starling with a scrap of glitter is quite ready to turn its back on all Manhattan. Outside the box, the streetwalker from some big square state named for the Indians no longer believes in the box — you can’t pay her enough for that bullshit. Inside, outside, what’s the difference? Stenciled graffiti depicting gangsters with their heads tucked under their wings begin to crop up on lampposts and parking meters. The edge of the curb becomes a liminal zone; plastic shopping bags cartwheel into traffic & vanish. What’s for supper? Outside the box, one blurry still from a security camera leads the cops to a cluttered apartment & a thousand greasy iterations of the same spiral labyrinth. The suspect is a serial — albeit unconscious — printer of his own fingertips, if nothing else. The lieutenant says, I didn’t get this job by thinking inside the box. Someone with a white cloth unfolded in his lap like a minimal newspaper sinks a knife into his steak & smiles to see it blush. It’s medium-rare, this high-plains sunrise. It tastes like iron.
Letter from Midsummer
Dear Todd,
I wonder what air
& daylight mean
to the boletes holding
their brown platters up,
or to Indian pipes
with their white
swan necks?
I guess it’s dissolution
that they’re after
here aboveground,
where you need
some kind of hide
or cuticle to hold
the darkness in.
They’re hoping for
a fetid breeze or
brush of insects—
whatever they can get.
Just now, sorting laundry
fresh from the line
in my warm bedroom,
I reached into
a black sweatshirt
to turn it rightside out
& found the evening
coolness hidden
in its sleeves.
Auras
In less than a minute after entering the woods, I acquire an aura of insects. I step carefully through knee-high wood nettles with my hands in the air, peer at the screen in the back of my camera as if it were an escape hatch, and focus on the one still fly.
Now that they are silent and surrounded by new forest, we want the lime kilns to bear more than a passing resemblance to Mayan temples — to have been shrines to something other than greed and toil. We want their gaping to reflect openness rather than consumption, and their standing apart to signify fidelity to a transcendent vision, one that was always intended to culminate in a hillside of yellow moccasin flowers, tulip trees dripping with nectar, and an abandoned mine harboring endangered bats.
A thunderstorm shakes me out of sleep in the small hours. I lie awake listening to non-human screams — cat? Raccoon? In the morning, I peer up into the crevasse between the portico and the house, as if the bat’s sleeping face held any clues. The peonies are bent double with their latest haul of rain.
Therapy again
Video link (subscribers must click through).
Yeah, I know it’s the wrong time of year, but the music made me do it — that, or else I have what Wallace Stevens called a mind of winter. Encouraged in part by a post by Lucas Green — “poets, poems, and videotape” — in which he argued that poetry is fundamentally an oral art, I wanted to see what would happen if I put more thought into the soundtrack, mixing voice and music in Adobe Audition first, then cutting and splicing video clips to fit. I’d been searching the free music site Jamendo.com for something to use in a different poem when I happened across the Sound Sculptures of one daRem, and immediately thought of my old poem “Therapy.” The composer describes her/his five tracks as “Experimental ambient music with a dark, but calm touch. Originally written for use as music for art exhibitions of my father.”
The extended version of “Therapy” includes a prose introduction, haibun-style, but when pondering video possibilties this morning, I couldn’t see how to make that work. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination, and I’m simply too much of a neophyte to know how to switch registers like that and make it work.
I appreciate the dissenting views on the value of music in the comments to my previous video, and I’ll be curious to see if my inclusion of a piece of experimental electronica this time also meets with opposition. My basic goal with poetry soundtracks, I think, is to find pieces that fit the mood I was in when I wrote the poem. One problem, though, is that music with a regular rhythm may conflict with the rhythms in the poem. So it probably makes more sense to search avant-garde classical, electronic, and ambient music — or less-composed soundscapes, if I can find them. (I’d need a dish microphone to gather my own ambient audio, so that probably won’t happen for a while.)
I’m not sure about the effect I gave my voice here. I think that could be better. But the main thing I learned today was that fairly lengthy spaces between stanzas or sentences can work so long as music is present.
Which is good, because I think such spaces are really important to aural comprehension: the main problem most people have with poetry readings is that the words go by too damn fast, at least with poems composed for the page. Modern lyrical poetry is nothing if not dense with layered meanings and images. Slam poetry works, when it works, because it’s not terribly subtle, and because it tends to repeat phrases and ideas, in common with almost all truly oral poetry. But more than once I’ve had the experience of buying a book or chapbook by an outstanding live performer only to find that the energy didn’t translate to the page. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed by lackluster readings from poets whose written work I love. So now I’m wondering: are Lucas and I crazy to dream of a hybrid between the two?
*
By the way, I apologize to readers on dial-up. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy and videography is what I want to learn right now, so I’m afraid you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of this kind of blog post.
Ceremonial
After dark, when the woods
turn back into a forest,
go stand under an umbrella
& let your prim column
of not-rain become
as anonymous as the others.
Count the drips until you lose
track of everything else.
Inhale the fertile aroma
of log-rot & truffle
as if it were the freshest tea.
Ignore the lightning flash,
what it does to the ground:
a stark here-&-now
of sticks & leaves into which
it no longer seems possible
to sink. Raise your face
to the false vault of ribs.
Spaceship Earth
The chair in the forest accommodates
a cushion of moss — better than
the bedspring, which collects dead leaves
& the rare blackberry sprout.
The canes never get too far
in their explorations of the dappled light
before a deer discovers them & has them
for breakfast, spines & all, threading
her hooves through the rusty coils
& the jumble of squarish stones
where walls once rested.
High overhead, a scarlet tanager
grooms under his wingpits
during each pause in his recital.
If only the lice that live humdrum lives
in the forest of his feathers
could see him as we do! An idea
of perfection, a glimmering jewel
alone in the overgrown void.
***
In an old edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone once responded to the Spaceship Earth metaphor as like being out in the New Mexico night, looking at the stars, and gasping “it’s just like the planetarium!”
—Chris Clarke
Nature in 140 characters: microblogging from the front porch
For years, I’ve greeted the day by sitting out on the front porch of my 150-year-old cottage in a mostly wooded hollow in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. It’s a habit I began back when I was a smoker, I guess. Fresh from a hot shower, I find if I bundle up enough and cradle a thermos mug of coffee in my hands, I can sit outside even in the middle of January, though I might not last for more than 15 or 20 minutes on the coldest days. The porch sits high above a small, overgrown yard, which is adjacent to the woods’ edge, the headwaters of Plummer’s Hollow Run, and a small cattail marsh next to the old springhouse. Due to this strategic location, it’s probably one of the best spots for watching wildlife on the mountain. If I sit still enough, the animals quickly forget I’m there.
This daily habit of quiet observation is very important to me. Even if the rest of my day is taken up with busyness and distractions, at least I’ll have had a short period of attentiveness to the natural world to keep me grounded and keep my writing from straying too far into the ether. When I began blogging in December 2003, I had some idea that I would focus on religious agnosticism — whence “Via Negativa” — but within a very short time, morning porch observations began to creep in, and pretty soon I dropped all pretence of a focus in favor of writing about whatever popped into my head first thing in the morning.
In November of 2007, I started a new online experiment: using Twitter to record daily observations from the front porch. I unexpectedly found the 140-character limit a goad to lyricism. Like the French writers in the Oulipo movement, I’ve always been interested in “seeking new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy,” especially those involving artificial constraints. I hadn’t meant to write poetry, but readers on Twitter began to assure me that’s what I was doing, and who am I to argue?
I soon began backing up these posts to a blog — The Morning Porch — and in July of 2008, switched from Twitter to the much more reliable and feature-rich, open-source alternative Identi.ca as my primary microblogging platform, though I continue to forward my updates to Twitter via an automatic bridge.
My main goal with this project, I suppose, is to excite curiosity about and appreciation for the natural world among other users of Twitter and Identi.ca (and to some extent, my contacts on Facebook, where my Morning Porch posts also appear via an application for Friendfeed, another micromessaging service which I use mainly for lifestreaming purposes). Both as a poet and as a nature-lover, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to reach beyond traditional audiences, and not just preach to the choir. A loose-knit community of poets, geeks, and other assorted misfits has sprung up on Identi.ca, which is to Twitter roughly as a very cool party is to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There are many more birders recording their observations on Twitter, perhaps influenced by that service’s songbird iconography, but I don’t consider myself a birder — I’m not particularly interested in keeping lists or identifying rare nonresident species — so I haven’t made an active effort to connect with them, beyond following those whose blogs I already read. There are also active groups of poets, gardeners, eco-freaks, and other compatible folks on Twitter, though they’re slow in discovering each other due to the lack of effective, platform-internal semantic tagging and group tagging — features I’ve grown used to on Identi.ca.
Oddly, perhaps, given its origin on social networking services, I haven’t installed a comments system on the Morning Porch blog. The posts themselves are so short, I guess I’m resistent to the idea of burdening them with commentary; if folks want to comment, they can simply join Identi.ca and respond there. Also, the platform I’m using, Tumblr, doesn’t have native comments, and I’m reluctant to commit to an external commenting system because there’s a good chance I’ll move the blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation at some point. (Tumblr has promised to introduce an export tool.) (UPDATE: The blog has now been moved to a self-hosted WordPress installation with comments ennabled.)
I hope to keep the Morning Porch chronicle going for at least five years, and I envision a synoptic nature book with one page for each day of the year, five paragraphs or stanzas per page. Since I hardly ever leave home, this seems doable. But it’s also fun to go back and re-read sections of the journal in the order they were written. Looking at my posts from last May, for example, one can gain some appreciation for the two great dramas of a northern Appalachian spring: the return of neotropical migrant birds and the leafing out of the forest canopy. In May, more than any other time of the year, the forest is a-twitter.
***
May 1, 2008
Roar of the quarry in my left ear, burble of a wren in my right, and in the front yard a catbird sits in the lilac, silent, head swiveling.
May 2
Two Jurassic-like things, both of them “great”: the call of a great-crested flycatcher, and seconds later, a great blue heron in flight.
May 3
The air smells of rain. A large robber fly buzzes into my weed garden and lands on the underside of a dame’s-rocket leaf.
May 4
The bleeding-heart I bought yesterday, still in its pot, pulls in the first hummingbird of the year: shimmery red gorget, grotesque blooms.
May 5
Bright sunny morning. A hooded warbler bursts from the white lilac; for a moment I think it’s a yellowthroat with his mask on wrong.
May 6
Full leaf-out is still a week or two off. In the green wall of woods across from my porch, the dawn sky leaks through a hundred holes.
May 7
Behind the lilac, the sounds of a fierce wood thrush altercation. A third thrush lands close by and swipes its bill against the branch.
May 8
Rain at dawn. In the half-light, the green is intense. Add the bell-like tones of wood thrushes, and the effect is other-worldly.
May 9
Rain. Have robins always had white spots on the ends of their tails? Yesterday afternoon, four eastern kingbirds in the field—unmistakeable.*
May 10
Two myrtle colonies are closing in on what’s left of my lawn. In the grass, the green fists of bracken open complex fingers to the rain.
May 11
Sunday, and one can hear between bursts of oriole song the creaking of wings, the drone of a bumblebee, a deer snorting a quarter-mile off.
May 12
Black-throated green: the warbler lisping at the woods’ edge, but also the woods itself, green-feathered, trunks running dark with rain.
May 13
Cold and clearing. The black cat pads up the driveway, coyote bait still in her belly** and the usual hungry, hateful look in her yellow eyes.
May 14
At first light, the silhouette of a hawk in a dead tree above the corner of the field. A small rabbit grazes in the yard, ears twitching.
May 15
Cloudy and cool. A tanager’s plucked string; no glimpse of scarlet. Where are they off to, the hummingbirds that keep zooming past my porch?
May 16
At 6:00, the sky grows dark again as a storm approaches. Wood thrushes start back up. The lilac’s white torches all point at the ground.
May 17
The same woodpeckers and nuthatches that we heard all winter, but with flickering leaves. The same wind as yesterday, but with golden light.
May 18
A black-and-white warbler’s two-syllable whisper; drumroll from a Good God bird. The clock is blinking—what time IS it? The patter of rain.
May 19
Birdcall like the chant of some demented sports fan: the yellow-billed cuckoo is back! The forest canopy must be full enough to skulk in.
May 20
A gray squirrel seems to be in heat: as in January, the slow-motion chases, the soft scold-calls, but now mostly hidden by the leaves.
May 21
Sun! I hear the crow that thinks it’s a duck, a catbird’s simultaneous translation of a wood thrush song. Last night, I dreamed of bluejays.
May 22
A male robin scours the forest floor for twigs; the female combs the lawn for dead grass. The small thorn bush shakes when they both fly in.
May 23
The gibbous moon no sooner clears the trees than the sun comes up. First crystal-clear morning in weeks, and I’m off to New Jersey.
May 26
Robins mating on a branch: one-second contacts spaced half a minute apart. Each time the male flies off and the female ruffles her feathers.
May 27
Warm, humid, and overcast. In the side garden, the first twelve yellow irises opened in the night. Small flies walk all over my legs.
May 28
The flower heads on the white lilac are half-brown now. Two phoebes take turns flying into the bush, momentarily quelling insistent peeps.
May 29
Clouds like scales on the belly of a blue fish. In the garden, ants immobilized by the cold cling to the sweet pink seams of peony buds.
May 30
In one direction, a singing wood thrush; in the other, a red-eyed vireo. Evocative refrain or dull repetition? It’s all in the delivery.
May 31
In the light rain, a squirrel feasts on red maple keys. Reduced to pieces, the blades flutter straight down, robbed of all ability to spin.
_____
*A white tip on the tail is a diagnostic feature of the eastern kingbird.
**In other words, she was still pregnant.
Errata
Page iv, Acknowledgements: For “All the lovely ladies at Square Peg’s Round Hole in Crested Butte, Colorado” read “Carla, without whom none of this would matter”
Page 2, line 34: For “incessant screaming” read “frequent, energetic vocalization”
Page 8, line 3: For “heavily sedated” read “diagnosed with ADHD”
Page 14, line 11: For “Napalm Death” read “Bruce Springsteen”
Page 18, line 56: For “used” read “experimented with”
Page 23, line 5: For “two six-packs and a defective condom” read “a full moon”
Page 27, line 42: For “severe depression” read “the blues”
Page 31, line 10: For “anger management classes” read “continuing education”
Page 34, line 61: For “Harley-Davidson” read “second mortgage”
Page 36, line 4: For “restraining order” read “separation”
Page 36, line 22: For “social services” read “relatives”
Page 42, line 51: For “drug mule” read “adventure tourist”
Page 43, line 14: For “prison” read “group therapy”
Page 49, line 1: For “hair implants” read “Promise Keepers retreat”
Page 51, line 34: For “heart attack” read “wake-up call from Jesus”
Page 55, line 35: For “a lonely female professional with low self-esteem” read “the new love of my life”
Page 57, line 70: For “layoffs” read “voluntary redundancy program”
Page 62, line19: For “harassment” read “witnessing to my faith”
Page 66, line 27: For “stoned” read “self-actualized”
Page 73, line 8: For “relatives” read “elder care facility”
Throughout: Replace dashes with semicolons