Category: Greatest Hits

The best posts, based mostly on author preference but influenced also by reader reaction.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Brush Mountain

Sleep, I realized long afterwards, is the one thing that keeps us human, keeps us animal. Go without sleep – all sleep – for too many days in a row, and you lose the ability to inhabit your own body. Pain and pleasure become increasingly abstract. Your consciousness floats in an ether of pure mentation, immune to all worldly beauty. There are two doors, one marked Suicide and the other marked Madness. “What is behind door number three?” you want to know. There must be another way out! But Door # 3, if it even exists, is firmly locked and barred. To sleep, perchance to dream…

I was 16. I had been reading D.T. Suzuki on Zen and filling notebooks with increasingly incoherent thoughts, night after night. Odd things happened. On the day following my fourth sleepless night I completely dominated a volleyball game in gym class, I who had never had quick reactions and was completely unathletic (but in good shape from walking five miles a day, to and from school). That was an intensely egoistic high, a true power trip that I still recall with a bit of nostalgia, how I leapt and dove and shouted, eventually the only one left on my side of the net, playing against a half dozen jocks and winning. “So that’s what it feels like not to think, not to be self-conscious, never to second-guess oneself!” I said to myself afterwards. Who’d have thought that being a machine would feel so liberating?

On the morning after my fifth night without sleep, I was sitting in Miss McCaughey’s Spanish 2 class when the last thread connecting me to earth suddenly snapped. In a flash I realized that everything was empty, empty! I put my unreal books in my unreal pack, got to my unreal feet, and walked out of the unreal classroom and its soulless holographs of human beings, one of whom – the teacher – asked me where I was going. “Out,” I said. I remember her standing at the door of the classroom, watching me walk slowly and deliberately down the hall.

Poor Miss McCaughey! It was only her second year of teaching, and she told me later she’d thought she must’ve done something horribly wrong. When she recovered from her shock, she sent my friend Jim out to find me, but by that time, I was gone.

Gone. Out of the hated school that I now knew to be nothing but a test and a trick. Every sentient being had already achieved enlightenment but me; I was convinced of it. That very realization constituted my own ticket, I thought. I was flooded with something that might have been joy, if I had had any normal emotional reactions left with which to experience it. Now all I needed to do was walk out of the stage set. I was sure the exit would appear, and I’d know it when I saw it. All I had to do was abandon all lingering attachments to the world, expect nothing, and wait for the moment, which was already present, to fully present itself to me.

I dropped my pack by the side of the road. No need for that any more! Following my familiar route across town, I tried to climb the steep path up the side of the High School Hill and found I could not. Freezing rain a couple days before had turned the snow into slippery concrete in which it was impossible to find a foothold. I clawed my way about fifty feet up the side, slipped, and slid back down. Nothing to do but circle the hill, then, as I had done in the opposite direction just a few hours earlier, but had already completely forgotten. No wonder I believed so fervently in the perpetual present – it was all I had left.

A half hour later, on my way out of town, I remember stopping in the middle of the bridge over Bald Eagle Creek and staring at the water, fascinated. I took off my gloves one at a time and dropped them in the water, watched them float rapidly away. My hat followed. I think I probably would’ve taken off all my clothes if it hadn’t been so cold out.

The sun beat down from a sea of blue – all light, no heat. The snow-blinding world glittered, impenetrable. I don’t remember much of my walk up the hollow. It’s amazing, really, that I remember any of this at all. Some time around noon, I think, I reached the end of our mile-and-a-half-long driveway and started across the lawn toward the house. That’s when it finally hit me, the sudden realization I’d been waiting for. If I had to put it into words, it would be something along the lines of, Dude, you’re out of your fucking mind!

Everything fell into place. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s also the perfect image for what happened. Everything fell back into its rightful place and I stood there in the glare ice under a cloudless sky staring at the house I’d grown up in, aware and ashamed of my nakedness before the world. I looked all around. The mountain – this mountain – was just a mountain again.

As I walked in the door, the phone started ringing. Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, I remember thinking, as a great wave of weariness crested and broke.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Nineveh

I made baked fish for supper last night – thick thawed steaks of mahi-mahi, the gift of an acquaintance who had caught them herself in a fishing trip off North Carolina. I soaked them in lemon juice and smothered them under a thick blanket of whole wheat bread crumbs that had been sauteed in olive oil with cumin, coriander and plenty of basil and garlic. It was delicious, but too plentiful; I ate too much. Exhausted as I was when I finally went to bed, I woke after several hours, feeling the fish in my stomach and listening to the downpour on the roof.

This is our first major winter storm here in central Pennsylvania. All night and into the morning – continuing even as I type at 8:30 – hard rain has been falling and freezing, falling and dripping and freezing. As the small hours crawled by, I could hear the muffled cracks and crashes of trees giving way under the weight of ice. Twice when I got up, the digital clock at the foot of the stairs was flashing, but miraculously, the electricity stayed on. The second time, I stayed up to read for a little while. The book I grabbed was Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History, where I found the following line:

Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.

I poked my head outside at one point around 4:30 and noticed a light in the far window of the main house. My father, too, was awake. Sometimes I think of insomnia as the family curse. Every family needs a good curse, don’t you agree?

At quarter after six, following a brief hour of sleep, I rise for the final time, anxious to brew my coffee and take a shower before the power goes. I’m out on the porch by 6:35, cradling my mug and listening to the fuselage. If you’ve never been through a major ice storm, let me tell you, it sounds like war. The difference with this one is the sheer volume of water in the stream, whose roaring drowns out most smaller breaks. What I hear are the sharp rendings of limbs, the explosive cracks of trunks snapped halfway up, and the thunderous crashes of full-sized trees giving way at the roots.

There are hundreds of acres of woods in all directions, and a high percentage of canopy-height trees are weedy, first-succession species such as black locust, black cherry and scarlet oak, many of them near the end of their natural life span of 80-120 years. The only thing preventing me from accepting this damage with complete equanimity is the knowledge that many parts of the forest may never successfully regenerate, beset as it is by a triple threat of white-tailed deer, invasive trees and shrubs, and acid precipitation. Usually one thinks of the effects of acid rain in terms of damage to the soil and water, but during ice storms, the trees and shrubs are encased in acidic armor that may last for days at a time. I can’t believe this doesn’t do a lot of damage, especially to evergreens like hemlocks and mountain laurel.

One thing I don’t have to worry about, however, is direct damage to the houses. Those farmers knew what they were doing when they planted their houses in the middle of large clearings, out of reach of any but a few ornamental trees. Usually I resent this distance between my house and the woods, but this morning I’m grateful for it.

The day dawns on an eerie and beautiful landscape. Ice storms of this severity have occurred with increasing frequency over the past thirty years – now they come as often as once every three to four years – but this is the first I can remember when the ground was completely bare of snow. The effect therefore is of pure, unmitigated crystal, white from a distance only in the way that cut glass appears white. If I had a camera and put a picture up here for you to look at, you’d probably imagine that every surface would answer a curious tap with a resonant ding. But such beauty weighs heavily on the real world. Even just reading about it, you might picture sleek, transparent body suits for every branch. But all the twigs droop with closely spaced, finger-long icicles, racks and racks of little knives – and that’s where the extra, fatal bit of load comes from. The 20-foot-tall red cedar tree in my herb garden is bent completely over, its head to the ground. In desperation, I get the broom from the kitchen and give it a few nudges to see if I can shake any of the ice loose. All I manage to do is roust out a couple of terrified sparrows.

I take my umbrella and go for a walk around the field – the woods are too dangerous. Now I can watch as well as listen to the limbs and trees crash down, at the rate of several a minute. When the big ones go over, they send up a brief splash of ice fragments. They also trim limbs and branches from their neighbors, which may not be entirely unwelcome. Any time I see a branch or limb breaking loose, I wonder if it isn’t just the radical amputation the parent tree needs to take the weight off the main trunk. It’s all in the architecture, of course. Trees that are built for the long haul, such as tulip poplars and white oaks, are masters at dropping the odd limb and quickly healing over the wound before infections can enter. You’d think hemlocks and white pines, with the tremendous weight of ice on their needles, would – like my red cedar – be the first to go. But as I survey the line of hundred year-old white pines along the driveway, I can see how easily each ice-laden limb rests its weight on the limb below. Hemlocks and spruce are even better at this, folding up like umbrellas under a heavy layer of snow or ice. Hence their tendency to eventually dominate northern forests, given a few centuries of winter storms to weed out the competition.

I approach as close as I dare to the woods on the northeast side of the field, above Margaret’s old house. Five large, downed trees – black cherries and locusts – stretch out into the field. Beyond, it looks as if at least a quarter of the trees have been felled or badly dismembered by the ice.

Dramatic and beautiful as this all may seem, I’m keenly hoping for a rapid rise in temperature. I don’t believe in petitionary prayer, but do try to picture, as hard as I can, ice falling off the trees: big frozen swordfish-size chunks dropping from the limbs, schools of ice-minnows slipping from the crowns. I visualize Marianne Moore’s “Octopus of Ice” dissolving into harmless calamari. But really, these things that are wreaking havoc now are more like giant squid with their sinister, cigar-shaped heads anchored upside-down to the boles of trees and their tentacles poised, terrible and still. To them, perhaps, the forest is a sideshow, and they are waiting for some properly monstrous prey – as if the fish I ate for supper had grown into a whale in my belly and I was soon to deliver it on the never-never shoreline of Nineveh, that great city. The rain shows no sign of letting up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

After words

Es war Erde in ihnen, und
sie gruben. . . .

Es kam eine Stille, es kam auch ein Sturm,
es kamen die Meere alle.
Ich grabe, du grí¤bst, und es grí¤bt auch der Wurm,
und das Singende dort sagt: Sie graben.

O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du:
Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging?
O du grí¤bst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu,
und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring.

(Paul Celan)

There was earth inside them, and
they dug. . . .

There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.

(Michael Hamburger, tr., Poems of Paul Celan)

*

Say the near past and the far past if you want, picturing a journey there on foot, or excavations of varying depth and complexity. But in our technological civilization, travel has become so fast, so easy, so painless, and our contacts with the dead so infrequent and unreal, it’s easy to forget the perils. “What charming folklore!” exclaims the modern reader of Amos Tutuola’s strange stories. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he warns: “DO NOT FOLLOW UNKNOWN MAN’S BEAUTY”:

But when they had travelled about twelve miles away from that market, they left the road on which they were traveling and started to travel inside an endless forest in which only all the terrible creatures were living….

[T]hen the complete gentleman in the market that the lady was following, began to return the hired parts of his body to the owners…

– and by then it was too late to turn back.

Recent news reports describe former fishermen in Sri Lanka not only putting as much distance between themselves and the ocean as possible, but refusing to eat seafood. The president of Sri Lanka is being urged to help revitalize the fishing industry by publicly consuming one, symbolic fish. It’s not hard to imagine the viceral revulsion survivors must feel, their antipathy toward the ocean that had been like a nurturing parent.

A strangely prescient meditation by Sarah Hinkley Wilson in the Christian Century, published on December 28 but doubtless written well before, reflects on Psalm 29 (“The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters….The LORD sitteth upon the flood.”) Wilson reminds us that, in the world of the Hebrew Scriptures, the waters are associated with the forces of chaos and destruction from the Creation story, through the Flood, through the Exodus myth where the waters of the Red Sea destroy the Egyptian army, and the waters of the Jordan present an inviolable barrier for an entire generation, condemned to die in the wilderness for their lack of faith.

In the Bible, wild nature is not something to be trifled with. Wilson concludes:

[W]hatever the voice of the Lord is saying under the circumstances detailed in the psalm, no one can hear it and live. If this is the voice that produced the succession of devastating hurricanes in the Gulf last fall, the only sensible solution is not to worship, but to evacuate. You can’t ride this storm. You must, as Luther said, “flee from God to God,” from the God who drives you out to the same God who welcomes you home.

This God, who is over many waters and sits enthroned over the flood, has himself been swept overboard, immersed and engulfed in the river Jordan [Matthew 3:13-17]. Baptism with water is not enough, for God also flashes forth flames of fire: he baptizes with fire and the Holy Spirit. Water and fire on their own are words of God that are encoded and indecipherable. To worship God in unmediated nature is to risk ruination. But to drown in the waters of baptism in which the Lord himself was drowned, to receive the pentecostal fire of the Spirit which the Lord himself sent – in this way we creatures of nature can worship our God in nature, and live. [Italics added.]

Fierce as this seems, it strikes me as possibly a little too timid, a little too pat in its implied moral that, after all, it’s best to worship indoors. Are Christians not called upon to imitate Christ, and Jews to imitate Elijah, Moses and Miriam, all of whom were severly tested in the wilderness? I am aware, however, that many readers of this passage are likely to have the exact opposite reaction, recoiling in horror from the thought of having to partake of such a strange fish as this God or Christ who appears so capricious – who may even seem to derive telluric power from feeding on the untimely dead. How can a God who is supposed to be [insert favorite adjective here] perpetrate or permit [insert name of catastrophe]?

*

The problem with trying to worship God “outside protective church walls, in the wilds of Creation,” notes Wilson, is that “you might not like what you hear.” The implication is that many believers choose to confine their religiosity to pleasant-sounding things, half-truths that make them feel safe and snug as they warm their hands in front of the burnt offerings. It would be nice to imagine that such narrow-mindedness is the special provenance of fanatics and fundamentalists, like the woman Susan of A line cast, a hope followed sat next to recently on a plane:

At the point where she tried to draw some connection between the earthquake and tidal wave and some divine vengeance God wanted to wreak on all Muslims for following a faith that celebrating killing, I cut her off in anger, then buried myself in a book. I could have explained to her that there were many thousands of non-Muslims in those areas, patiently dealt with her massive misperceptions like I had with the other statements of prejudice, but it was obvious that this woman was permanently lost in a sea of ignorance.

But the way I see it, we are almost all swimming in similar waters. Isn’t it human nature to believe things that are comforting and easy, and to reject whatever challenges us? Rabbi Michael Lerner’s response to this age-old problem of theodicy (“to justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton put it) started out strong.

Two weeks ago the United Nations issued a report detailing the deaths of more than 29,000 children every single day as a result of avoidable diseases and malnutrition. Over ten million children a year!! The difference between the almost non-existent coverage of this on-going human-created disaster and the huge focus on the terrible tsunami-generated suffering in South East Asia reveals some deep and ugly truths about our collective self-deceptions.

Say it, Rabbi! He was a guest on a call-in radio program shortly after the disaster took place, he writes, and he marveled

how many people responded to the question [“Where was God During the Tsunami?”]…by calling in to give messages that were roughly of the following sort: I am really angry at God, and this is precisely why I don’t believe in Him.

I don’t know any other non-existing being who gets such a bad rap. It’s as if people need to invent God in order to blame Him for something about which they are justifiably in despair.

He goes on to remind readers that the notion of God as Prime Mover (or totalitarian ruler, for that matter) comes from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, and is not an original or even a desirable component of Judeo-Christian thinking.

Instead, understand God as THE FORCE OF HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNIVERSE, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being as it moves the being of the universe toward greater and greater levels of love and connection and consciousness, and makes possible the transcending of that which is toward that which ought to be. Seen this way, God is not the all-powerful being that determines every moment of creation, but rather the part of creation aspiring toward love, kindness, generosity, peace, and social justice which is evolving toward greater power to shape our common destiny to the extent that we choose to embody it more fully. Or in more traditional theological language, God is a Creator, and the creation is still taking place as the God energy of the universe develops and manifests more and more through the universe, shaping it to be more fully in accord with God’s aspiration for a world of love, compassion, justice, peace and generosity.

This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Especially since it allows human beings of their own free will to participate in the work of world-healing. I’m down with that, I guess. Except that already this notion of evolving and developing makes me nervous; both usages are popular distortions of what I consider to be the true meanings of these words. (“Evolution” is simply change; no progress is implied. And “develop,” etymologically, means not to build up but to strip down, to uncover the essence of something.) Trying to think of God – any god – as “a force” makes me queasy. And the essay goes downhill from there, with a consideration of a strand of thinking Lerner calls “The Ethical Biosphere”: that “the living planet, the gaia energy of our planet, cannot reach a state of being settled and calm until the moral and spiritual realms are more centered and connected with the universe’s ultimate moral design.”

In this view, the physical world will be unable to function in a peaceful and gentle way until the moral/spiritual dimension manifest in the behavior of God’s creatures coheres with God’s will: that is, is filled with justice, peace, generosity, love and kindness. Till then, gaia will be restless, its tectonic plates shifting, its weathers unpredictable, its diseases finding new ways to reproduce.

Imagine having to share a plane ride with someone who thought like that!

This is an example of the Grand Narrative theory of human or planetary history, and there’s no denying that various versions of it have played a central role in the shaping of most Jewish and Christian worldviews. To this day, most of us find it hard to think of history apart from the modern myth of progress, which is a direct descendent of Biblical eschatology. The ancient inhabitants of the tiny kingdom of Judah, beset by one national disaster after another, invented the Grand Narrative theory of historiography, which says: “My little life makes sense, because it is all part of a huge, almost unimaginable Plan – which will eventually end happily ever after.”

In other words, life makes sense because someday it will all end.

*

The poet Rodger Kammenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elijah, also has an essay on the Tikkun website. Disasters don’t have to make sense, he maintains.

There is no explanation and I do not accept the answer suggested by the Buddhist idea of group karma, that whatever happens to a group is somehow the result of a previous action of that group. In this life or a previous life. You can believe that if you wish, but I don’t believe it in this case. I don’t believe it because this happened to children. They didn’t have enough time in this life to deserve this death. And in a previous life? No, that is too abstract for me. The explanation lacks specificity and I already lack too much specificity when I am dealing with a number of deaths so huge, and at such a great distance. I need to feel more, not less. One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said – these aren’t his exact words – that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination. He called the child a “dear one.” And he said, “You must know that your ‘dear one’ does not want you to suffer, to feel so much grief.” It was a meditation I found wholly beautiful. He added that for a Buddhist, suffering is in the nature of things and so he would try to remind a Buddhist to reflect on that. But he said, for a Westerner, there would arise the question of meaning, which boils down to the question of Job, why would a just God allow the innocent to suffer? The question is just as profound for an individual loss as for a mass disaster: it doesn’t get more profound, just more inescapable. I don’t believe that a mass disaster, in and of itself, tells us anything about God. I don’t believe in a God who punishes through disaster. The disaster is. That is exactly the way I would understand it, without adding my own interpretation, without supplying a meaning or completing the sentence. The disaster is. The tragedy is. And I need to abide with it, and feel it, instead of seeking an answer, because the answers just make me complacent and take me away from the children on the beach, and the father with the dead child in his arms.

As the psycholinguist Walter J. Ong observed (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word), the invention of writing systems causes a sea-change in human consciousness. “Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface.” A story unfolds as a scroll that we can return to at any point, with an end we can always skip ahead to, ignoring or perhaps skimming quickly through the many devil-haunted details that come before. The spoken word, along with the silences that surround it, is gradually devalued. It takes events of great horror and magnitude to stun us into silence, and to make us feel the weight of each word in our hearts.

We dig, we dig, we dig. We journey into the past so easily in a literate civilization, taking our pick of this history or that memoir, living perhaps with the works of long-dead authors in a kind of cohabitation so intimate that we are liable to forget entirely that these are the words of the dead. We practice very few of the numerous precautions – call them taboos if you like – that people in oral societies tend to observe in the telling or embellishing of stories. For example, for native peoples in a huge swath of North America, ordinary stories – stories told outside a ritual context – traditionally could never be recounted during the half of the year between the spring and autumn equinoxes. The (to us) puzzling explanation for this is that summer is when the snakes are active, and snakes have complete intolerance for narrative embroidery! Only when the ground is hard and frozen, here in the north, can tales be told. (Though in fact this prohibition extended far south, into lands where frosts are unknown).

In the Bible, too, the serpent is the cleverest of creatures. In the original telling of the Garden of Eden story – before centuries of interpretations changed the way we read it – the serpent is not at all evil, much less a stand-in for Satan. He is simply a smooth talker. Here in the “Laupe” portion of the blogosphere, I think most of us are quite adept at second-guessing ourselves and questioning our motives for always wanting to explain, to embroider, to talk smoothly and draw meaning from every event. Thus the past two weeks have seen a number of quite compelling pleas for silence or extreme circumspection, for example at Nomen est Numen, alembic, The Middlewesterner and Hoarded Ordinaries.

But humans are storytelling creatures perhaps above all else. The vernacular body presented “A story” based on elck’s own experiences in India these past few weeks.

Civic disorder seems a natural state for a country whose philosophy is more ethereal than that of those Greeks who sought to impose rational design on the world’s fearsome Kaos. Here, chaos is embraced for the elemental truth that it is.

The main action unfolds on the plane ride home.

In my seat, I catch up on the news. The Times of the India gives the latest death toll from the earthquake as a hundred and twenty thousand. A smaller front page article says “352 thousand babies will be born today”; the article discusses the daily birth rate, and the daily death rate (150,000). An attempt to set the horror of catastrophic death in context. Inside, there is a quotation from the Vedas about tranquility in the midst of sorrow. The grand arithmetic and the spiritual verities are helpful, but it is weird and discomfiting to confront the photographs of the watery disaster, to read some of the human stories behind the news. Flying away from the region of the catastrophe, the story begins to become real. Or rather: the story was real before, but it now becomes tainted by sentimentality (this problem worsens after I return to the US).

I fold away the newspapers and begin reading a book I picked up in a bookshop in Bandra the previous day, The Undiscovered Country by Eknath Easwaran. It is a book about death, about “exploring the promise of death.”

The old man in the blue sweater finally gets up from his seat, three rows in front of mine, and shuffles past us and goes to the bathroom to take his leak.

I won’t spoil the ending, for those who haven’t read it yet. Suffice it to say that this is a model of the storytelling art, and that the ending takes one completely by surprise with its wrongness, which at the same time seems somehow right – or at least unavoidable – and thus tragic. For tragedy is, above all, a human construct.

“Death should never be faceless,” elck intones; “death is always personal.”

*

“What is the possible response,” asks Beth at the cassandra pages, “other than tears, and an attempt to help?” (I like it that she says “possible” instead of the expected “proper.”)

But, of course, help can take many different forms: gifts of money or labor, concrete efforts toward preventing a repetition of the disaster, or more intangible gestures aimed at world healing and transformation (tikkun). My favorite response to this disaster so far comes from Beth W. and her husband Buck, as recounted in Switched at Birth. A couple hundred trees at a time, they are replanting their forest, devastated last fall by Hurricane Ivan. Only the day before, Beth had written that

The hurricane rearranged my own personal walking woods, and I’ve been damn put out about it. That’s the blind, self-seeking, pride-filled truth of it. My meditation walks became distracted ramblings which I had begun to eschew for the bland indoor treadmill.

But this morning, it’s as though some fog of depression or grief had lifted, bouyed by nature’s insistence on reasserting itself.

“The joy is back,” she writes, but significantly, for her, that’s just the beginning – not an end in itself.

Setting a line, I plant a seedling, walk four steps, look around for volunteer plants, dodge thick prickly briars, and plant another one. The late afternoon mix of glare and shadow makes it difficult to distinguish brown from green.

I think of the children, the mothers, the fathers, and how their ocean swallowed or crushed them. Pausing over my orange metal dibble, one foot resting on its metal edge, I draw my left hand across my eyes and wonder for a moment if I can complete the task.

Continuing, I whisper a name as each seedling goes into the damp soil. . . “for you, Jayanga. . . for you, Raj . . . for you, Harmiel. . . . for you, Rasheed. . . for you, Sunil. . . for you, Mahindra. . . for you, Sando . . . for you, Crishan. . . for you, Jaseem” — for you all, for you all, and water them with tears, with love.

Love: an age-old answer, perhaps the finest our civilization has to offer. Or is it really just another question, raised to a higher pitch? As the piece at The Middlewesterner says (rearranging Tom’s originally italicized words into the poem that they refused to be):

Which is the dancer,
which the dance?
Who is eater,
who gets eaten?
Who takes?
Who gives back?

And on our finger the ring awakes.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Falconiform

At ease, lieutenant.

Thank you, sir.

I understand you’ve been able to keep all the runways free of pigeons for the last week with just two birds.

Yes, sir.

How is that possible? Do they really kill that many pigeons?

No, sir. They haven’t killed more than half a dozen. What happens is that the regular presence of a hawk or falcon completely traumatizes a local prey population. They either lie low, only venturing a few feet from cover, or they move somewhere else entirely.

Kind of a shock and awe thing, then?

Yes, sir. (To incoming falcon) Here we go. Good boy! (Falcon lands on glove. The falconer deftly secures the leather straps around its feet and slips a hood over its head.)

What – what’s the hood for?

Oh, it just keeps them tractable, sir. They’re very high-strung. The very thing that makes them such effective killing machines – that single-minded intensity – makes them less than ideal pets, I’m afraid.

Not something I’d want my five-year-old to play with, eh?

No, sir!

Now, what species is this one here? Is this a peregrine?

Its daddy was a peregrine, yes sir. But it’s a hybrid: its mother was a merlin.

How is that possible? Artificial insemination?

Yes, sir.

They must be quite valuable, then.

Yes, sir. I wouldn’t be able to afford them if I didn’t breed them myself.

Oh, really? Do you mind my asking how you do that? I mean, I grew up in cow country, I know how they do it with bulls…

(Chuckles.) Well, sir, it’s a little different, I think. I have a special hat that I wear…

Shaped like a female falcon, I suppose?

Well, no, sir, that isn’t necessary. I use the same hat for all my birds – everything from kestrels to red-tail hawks. See, the kind of visual cues they respond to are more motion-oriented, just like they won’t go for a pigeon unless they see it fluttering or walking around.

So you put on this special hat and you, um…

I initiate courtship, sir. (Chuckles.) I do exactly what a sexually receptive female of their own species would do: about five minutes of head and torso bobbing, like this, then…

(Incredulously) They mistake you for a female falcon? I thought these birds were considered highly intelligent!

They have just enough brains to do what nature designed them to do, sir. Find the target. (Continues miming falcon courtship display.)

Thank you, that’s enough, lieutenant.

Yes, sir.

Carry on, then.

Yes, sir. (Salutes, keeping left arm horizontal. Falcon swivels its hooded head and clicks its beak.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Brainstorming 2005

Ideas for the coming year:

  • Go line by line through one of my poetry manuscripts, using each line as the jumping-off point for a new poem.
  • Compile and illustrate a Book of Missing Hours with old Via Negativa posts.
  • Run for office.
  • Use the Internet to rally support for a National Do Nothing Day on some date of no special significance, to change every year and be chosen by lot.
  • Apply to a large foundation, or to the state arts council, for a grant to support Via Negativa.
  • Become a stalker of a celebrity poet, such as Tess Gallagher or Rita Dove.
  • Donate one of my kidneys to a needy Iraqi.
  • Learn to paint by numbers.
  • Run amok.
  • Change my name to Chrysler.
  • Set goals and continually strive to achieve them.
  • Write a letter to somebody using actual pen and paper.
  • Sing along with the CD.
  • Poison pigeons in the park.
  • Start a new religion using nothing but slogans and television advertising jingles from the 1970s.
  • Crawl on my belly like a snake.
  • Make hay while the sun shines.
  • Persist in my delusions.
  • Collect all my fingernails, toenails, shed hair, laundry lint and, if possible, shed skin for an eventual computer-assisted collage portrait of Jesus, or maybe Elvis.
  • Submit something to somebody.
  • Rock and roll.
  • Acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
  • Turn this blog over to its readers.
  • Go on a date.
  • Get a job.

(Ha ha! Just kidding with those last two there.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Above the brim

Do you remember the Frost poem, “Birches”? I was that

boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

I learned to do that in my late teens, not with the white birches Frost had in mind, but with black birch and red maple saplings, neither of which were in short supply on this mountain. But I confess, it was the poem that put the idea in my head. Frost’s language was just accurate enough to provide all the direction I needed.

I used to climb trees a lot back then, but I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me on my own to purposely shimmy up a thirty-foot-tall tree that couldn’t quite support my weight. A few feet from the top it would start to tip. That’s when I’d turn and, facing outward, reach above my head, put the thin trunk in a stranglehold and leap. If the tree was the springy sort and I hadn’t miscalculated, it would bend gracefully and give me a good, swift ride back to earth. But sometimes it would snap and I’d land in a heap with half the tree on my head. I guess it helped that I was thick-skulled and only weighed 150 pounds. Just enough to be a living hell on birches, and not a dead one.

Do you remember the first time you realized, as viscerally as you can know anything, that words are, in the end, unsuited for carrying any burden but their own flowering, their individual crops of fruit or mast? Christmas of 1986 was a strange time. First came a visit from my long-distance girlfriend, then a visit from my brother’s. Both women were beautiful and had unique, vaguely angelic names to match. Break-ups were imminent in both cases, but that didn’t stop these two young women during their one day of overlap from taking each other’s measure in a not-so-subtly competitive way that all of us would later remember as hilarious.

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

I was nearing the end of my 21st year on the planet, and life seemed, by and large, a sweetly tragic affair that required much too much effort to make go. Some Caesar or another was always decreeing that all the world should be taxed. You go for a walk in the woods and you have two basic choices, it seemed to me then: out and back, or a big circuit. I remember the desperate energy with which I scrambled up one poor sapling after another, launched myself into space and returned more rapidly than I might have wished to the brown, unfrozen ground, until one day shortly after Christmas when the snow finally came and covered everything.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Shooting the water

A small procession on a red dusty road, and everyone’s dressed in red, red. The pace is not fast, the song is not slow, the pines aren’t stirring in the breeze. As they grow nearer you can see the black coffin, and it’s only three feet long, my dear, it’s only three feet long.

*

Well, yesterday morning I was making breakfast, and believe me when I tell you that there was nothing different about that. I always make the very same thing, because who wants a surprise first thing in the morning – or second, or third? A glass of orange juice from concentrate and two eggs fried sunny-side up in butter, sprinkled with dried tarragon. I sat down with the newspaper while I waited for the eggs to fry, my plate heating on a separate burner. Well, just as I got up and started across the kitchen toward the stove, I had the strangest feeling. It was a little like that feeling of weightlessness or disassociation one gets during orgasm, except there was no sensation involved, no question of pleasure or release – simply an absence. It lasted for less time than it takes to tell you about it, because to become conscious of a thing like that is to banish it almost immediately. Indeed, what I call a feeling was probably not the experience itself but its impression, like the afterimage that forms on the inside of your eyelids if you open your eyes for a split second and close them again.

*

What are they singing, these people, and why don’t they all look sad? The road is straight and hot and the heat waves make their legs appear to wobble from side to side. I climb the bank and rest in the shade of the scrubby pines, waiting, my camera at the ready. As they get closer, I notice something odd: the coffin has no lid.

*

Warning: objects in dreams are farther away than they appear. Whenever I happen to wake, right away I begin thinking about blogging. A dream that might otherwise seem unremarkable gains in significance simply from the prospect of being recounted. But I’m always wary of “recounting fraud,” you know? I ask myself, were things really so logical? Were they even as sequential as narrative conventions imply? And what was so frightening, why did familiar landmarks seem so huge, so full of shadows? The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life. I turn over onto my left side, knowing that I can only fall asleep on my right. Just before I drift off, I’ll roll back into place.

*

Like a log, my dear. I always sleep like a log. Like a log hitching a ride in a coffin. I peer through the telephoto lens in disbelief. They’ve dressed it in baby clothes, but it’s clearly no infant. If they’d debarked it, I might not have recognized it, but I can see the reddish-brown plates: it’s a mate to the trunks I’m standing among. The people shuffle past in weary cadence, clapping softly the way you clap when the cemetery’s a mile or two from town.

*

It’s rare that I’m terrified of something in a dream, but it’s just as rare that I don’t feel at least a little fearful. Face it, I’m a slow moving, medium-sized mammal with a number of potential predators to worry about. Sometimes I’m smaller and more rodent-like, but I’ve never yet dug my own burrows, always taking over the abandoned homes of other creatures instead. That’s human enough, isn’t it? At one point last night, for example, I was exploring a couple of woodchuck burrows near the top of the field that seemed to open up into some kind of cavern. I decided to test the echo, stuck my head into one of the holes and gave a roar. A couple of huge shadows detached themselves from the side of the pit and growled back, a low rumble. I felt a blast of hot, stinking air like a week-old corpse.

*

Whose log-body can this be, dressed so fine for its own funeral? I follow at a distance, already picturing how this will look on the glossy pages of National Geographic. The scene at the cemetery merits a three-page pull-out, at least. In place of gravestones, large, curved animal horns jut from the earth. Some are painted white; others have been wound about with colored yarn. Little bells dangle from the point of every horn. The wind is a welcome visitor, it seems.

*

Have you ever felt a wind inside your skull? Talk about mute, abject terror! A nightmare you’ll remember years later, looking through a magazine at the dentist’s office with the whine of the drill dimly audible above the Muzak. You find you can’t concentrate on much besides pictures, and fortunately this magazine has quite a few. In fact, it’s difficult to find the articles, apart from the captions and a few paragraphs following the titles – or are they headlines? The Misunderstood Manta. Ancient Nubia: Birthplace of the Pharoahs? A Funeral for the Whooping Cough. And here’s a nice piece on the Venus de Milo, which seems so emblematic of something or other. (Yes, of course she’s a which, never a who.)

*

Listen. Here it comes now through the pines, hissing. A gourd rattle gives it legs. Someone starts swinging a bullroarer and all the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The shutter clicks away, seemingly of its own accord: the sound made by the claws of rats on an empty granary floor. Not that they’d ever print that sort of thing. By the time the editors get done with my prose, baby, I barely recognize myself among all the cliches. I might as well be shooting so much water under a bridge, back in goddamn Iowa.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What grows

I remember as a child being especially fond of songs with accretionary verses. You know, like the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” or “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” A collection of Pennsylvania German songs in the book Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (edited by George Korson, Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), which I picked up at the same used book sale where I found Gerard’s Herball last month, includes some charming examples. Here’s one I especially liked.

I have, perhaps foolishly, mucked with the rather stilted translation a bit, despite my complete ignorance of the source language. According to the modern German-English dictionary I consulted, the verb wachs-en (wachst) means grow, sprout, come up, extend, increase, thrive. This verb is dropped in the middle verses (in favor of is), then reappears in the last two. Though in the latter case I have elected to go with “lies (with),” the choice of the original (and possibly prudish) translators, I think the shared meaning-element of growth and extension is a key to the whole song. Complimenting this verb, the noun Hecke also occupies a pivotal position, and seems to mean copse, thicket, hedge, underbrush, and also branch or twig by synecdoche, as with the English wood (a cognate of wild) coming to mean lumber. This simple song speaks volumes about the pre-modern European way of seeing the forest. I’ll give the German for the first and last verses and for each new noun as it crops up.

Was wachst in diesem Wald? (What Grows in This Wood?)

Sung by Emma Diehl at Freiburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania, 1938. Recorded by Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell.

Was wachst in diesem Wald?
En wunderscheener Bí¢m.
Bí¢m in di Hecke,
Zwishich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

What grows in this wood?
A very beautiful tree.
Tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this tree?
A very beautiful limb (Nascht).
Limb on the tree, tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this limb?
A very beautiful branch (Heck).
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree . . .

What grows on this branch?
Very beautiful leaves (Lí¢b).
Leaves on the branch, branch on the limb . . .

What is in these leaves?
A very beautiful nest (Nescht).
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch . . .

What is in this nest?
A very beautiful egg (Oi).
Egg in the nest, nest in the leaves . . .

What is in this egg?
A very beautiful bird (Vojjel).
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest . . .

What is on this bird?
A very beautiful feather (Fedder).
Feather on the bird, bird in the egg . . .

What is in this feather?
A very beautiful bed (Bett).
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird . . .

What lies in this bed?
A very beautiful woman (Dí¢m).
Woman in the bed, bed in the feather . . .

Was wachst in diesem Dí¢m?
En wunderscheener Schatz.
Schatz im Dí¢m, Dí¢m im Bett,
Bett im Fedder, Fedder am Vojjel,
Vojjel im Oi, Oi im Nescht,
Nescht im Lí¢b, Lí¢b am Hecke,
Hecke am Nascht, Nascht am Bí¢m,
Bí¢m in di Hecke, zwischich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Loose canon: 20th century poetry in English

In a recent post at The Vernacular Body discussing favorite novels, reference is made to Nabokov’s notion that “there aren’t really any great authors, only great books.”

I have always felt this to be true about poetry. Some of my favorite poets, such as Louise Glück and Sandra McPherson, have written only one book I really like. And for me, the book-length collection is the highest expression of the lyric poet’s art.

So this morning, I decided to try compiling a brief, annotated list of my favorite books of poetry in English from the 20th century. I went through my shelves, being careful to pull out only those volumes that I would want to have with me on the proverbial desert island (which is not so far from my reality here, when you come right down to it). As I did so, I was reminded of the agony my friend Jo has been going through over the past two years as she attempts to give away all but her most essential books in order to complete a long-distance move.

The pile at my left elbow is now close to three feet tall, and teeters dangerously. In the interest of brevity I’ll skip the usual bibliographic information in favor of links to Amazon. (I am not endorsing Amazon.com, they just happen to have the most complete information of any on-line bookseller of which I’m aware. Though for some of the older volumes here, they don’t give much, and you’d be better off using Google.) I have rather arbitrarily limited myself to one book per favorite author. I will not – probably could not – rank them in any way, other than to mention in passing which one might be my favorite of all.

American Primitive, by Mary Oliver. A difficult choice, since every one of Oliver’s books is worth its weight in gold. She is in my opinion the finest nature poet in the English language – ever.

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry. I remember not thinking too highly of Berry when I was in my late teens and twenties, but either he changed or I did. This book is unified both by theme and method of composition: each poem describes a walk he took on a Sunday morning in lieu of going to church. Other people write about sacred time; Berry lives it.

Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. I love books in which the dead speak; I think this was my first.

The Folding Cliffs, by W. S. Merwin. If I’d compiled this list a year or two ago, I probably would’ve included The Lice instead. But Merwin’s lyric poems are beginning to wear on me, whereas this book-length poem about 19th-century Hawaii is, I think, one of the most satisfying narrative poems I’ve ever read.

Praise, by Robert Hass. Hass has equally mastered the line, the poem and the book-length collection. Each of his books contains an argument of sorts, though it’s less logical than ecological – not something that one could spell out in a review. (It’s in the nature of a poem that it can’t be summarized, Cleanth Brooks maintained.) I haven’t yet read all his books, so my selection of this volume is highly provisional.

Selected and Last Poems, by Paul Zweig. Normally I wouldn’t include a “selected poems” in this sort of list, but C. K. Williams has done a marvelous job of editing Zweig’s incandescent deathbed poems and matching them with the best from the three books published during his lifetime. The Last Poems by themselves make a satisfying, chapbook-length cycle.

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, by William Carlos Williams. The last and most beautiful poems of a poet who didn’t always practice what he preached, in my opinion. Perhaps it took until the end of his life before he found a place in his plain poems for the luminosity that had always suffused his prose.

The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Like Zweig’s Last Poems, a posthumous collection that coheres better than most books whose authors were alive to cull and augment and rearrange. Owen would probably make most people’s lists of the greatest poets of the 20th century, on a par with Rilke, Neruda and Lorca.

Song of Napalm, by Bruce Weigl. Some of the best wartime poems since Wilfred Owen. (Yusuf Komunyakaa has written Vietnam poems that are equally searing; I simply haven’t read enough of him to include one of his books on this list.)

North of Boston, by Robert Frost. “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Mountain.” ‘Nuff said.

Even in Quiet Places, by William Stafford. Why not Traveling Through the Dark? Actually, it was a toss-up between his last and first books. (There aren’t many poets you could say that about!) I simply prefer the effortless quality of his late work to the more obvious craftsmanship of his earlier poems.

The Branch Will Not Break, by James Wright. Another tough choice. One of the first books of American poetry to fully assimilate the lessons of 20th century Spanish-language poetry and translations from classical Chinese and Japanese.

Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, by Pat Mora. So much better than Eliot’s stupid cats! Manages with unpretentious virtuosity what few novels ever could: to create a well-rounded and likable character (Aunt Carmen) entirely from the idiosyncratic prayers she addresses to her santos. So well crafted, you might not even notice how many of the poems rhyme on the first read-through. Beautifully illustrated with full-color photographs, this book also functions as an authoritative reference on Sonoran folk Catholicism.

Red Suitcase, by Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is always making such exquisite music out of the silence between direct statements!

The Colossus, by Sylvia Plath. When I was a kid, I really hated the melodrama and narcissism of Ariel. So it was a susprise to discover a few years back how much I liked this book (and Crossing the Water, too). Not too many modern poets do grotesque as well as Plath and Ted Hughes did.

Crow, by Ted Hughes. An invented myth cycle with all the inconsistency and variety in tone of the real thing. The Amazon reviews call it violent and nihilistic, but to me it’s just a fun book.

Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes. Jazz poetry is its own category now, but this was the original bebop masterpiece. Very close to oral poetry in the way it’s put together, reminiscent of the dance cycles of the Piman and Yuman-speaking Indians of the southwest.

Butterfly Effect, by Harry Humes. Very understated yet enormously affecting poems by the unofficial poet laureate of Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Winter News, by John Haines. If Alaska didn’t exist, John Haines would’ve had to invent it. Actually, I’m not so sure he didn’t. I love the shamanic/prophetic tone, at its freshest here in Haines’ first book.

Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982, by Jack Gilbert. A first masterpiece is followed by twenty years of silence, then matched with poems equally pure but twice as wise. On the one hand, it would be great if more poets were this severe in their determination to write only necessary poems. On the other hand, I myself aspire to be like William Stafford, writing a poem a day.

Radio Sky, by Norman Dubie. I’ve only read this twice, but I was very impressed both times. He does religion very, very well: Jacob Boehme, Thomas Merton, Philip K. Dick and the Aztec Lord of the Near and Close are all here.

Passing Through: The Later Poems, by Stanley Kunitz. A master and a mage. Kunitz has written more perfect poems than anyone else I can think of. And though a “Selected and New” volume, this has a very pleasing shape to it.

Elegy, by Larry Levis. A posthumous collection for which Philip Levine deserves much credit. Possibly my favorite book in this entire list – which says more about me than about the book, I suppose. I don’t care how short your attention span might be, once you start this book, I promise you will not be able to put it down. And when you have finished it, you will drink yourself into a stupor.

The Jacob’s Ladder, by Denise Levertov. The prophet of “holy presence” at her best.

Radiation, by Sandra McPherson. Erudition without irony; a bracing work. Few books are titled so aptly.

Cathay, by Ezra Pound. Barely long enough to qualify as a chapbook, I suppose, and not the translation it purported to be – more like original poems based on borrowed outlines. But what vivid poems they are, what a satisfying cycle!

You Can’t Have Everything, by Richard Shelton. Shelton does for the Sonoran Desert what Humes does for eastern Pennsylvania and Haines for Alaska: “we are here we cannot turn back/soon we hold out our hands/full of money/this is the desert/it is all we have left to destroy”

The Lost Son and Other Poems, by Theodore Roethke. The Far Field is the more obvious choice, but this book edges it out in my opinion because of the short cycle of greenhouse poems. Roethke really had a gift for writing about plants.

The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück. The best way to describe this is: a book of hours from a fallen Eden in which the poet addresses a God in whom she does not believe – and God and the plants in her garden talk back.

Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan. Ryan is the quintessential thinking person’s poet, and can turn word play into an extreme sport. A tortoise “lives/below luck-level, never imagining some lottery/might change her load of pottery to wings.” An osprey’s nest is “a spiked basket/with hungry ugly osprey offspring in it.”

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, by Martí­n Espada. My favorite political poet, populist in a way Carl Sandburg could only dream about. Makes one wonder why more lawyers don’t write poetry.

Fragments From the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911, by Carolyn Llewllyn. Though others, such as Mary Fell, have put poems in the mouths of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company workers, none had the vision and the audacity to make them complete human beings and reconstruct the contexts of their tragically curtailed lives. What’s astonishing is that this was Lllewellyn’s first book.

Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs, by Stephen Dunn. One of our wisest living poets at his most inventive. Few books of poetry satisfy so completely Mina Loy’s definition: “Poetry is prose bewitched; a music made of visual thoughts; the sound of an idea.”

The Gathering of My Name, by Cornelius Eady. Kind of Espada meets Langston Hughes: street-wise, jazz- and blues-inflected poems exploring the intersection of the personal and the political. (Which sounds awfully darned cliched, doesn’t it?)

BioGraffiti: A Natural Selection, by John M. Burns. Who knew doggerel could be this good? I suppose it helps to know something about nature, though. Chock-a-block with outrageous puns and illustrated with hilarious old engravings.

Loterí­a Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera with linocuts by Artemio Rodrí­guez. A Mexican artist and one of the foremost Chicano poets collaborated on this reinvention of the card game known as Loterí­a, which is similar to bingo. Herrera’s hip improvisations are the closest thing on this list to “beat poetry.” I don’t know if I’d like them half so well without the linocuts they’re reacting to, though.

Next: New Poems, by Lucille Clifton. Clifton has remained in my personal top ten list of favorite poets longer than almost any other, aside from Emily Dickinson. Next edges out her other books for me because of the sequence about her husband’s death from leukemia, the “shapeshifter poems,” and the way the whole collection moves from outrage to something approaching acceptance.

Dismantling the Silence, by Charles Simic. The “so-whatness” that infects some of his later books is nowhere in evidence here. “I’m searching/For what my left hand/Hid secretly/From the right,” he writes, which is just about the best brief I can imagine for the method behind his abundant madness.

The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché. The poet makes a virtue of fragmentation, acting as a spirit medium for “a haunting mosaic of grief,” as it says on the back cover. Epochal.

Cruelty/Killing Floor, by Ai. Actually two collections in one, of course, but better for it. Whether you like Ai’s work depends I suppose on how strong a stomach you have, and how much you value empathy. But she is a consummate wordsmith as well as a gifted seer.

Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. If anyone knows of a better book of travel poetry in the English language, I’d like to hear about it.

O.K., that’s all! Kind of frustrating how few of your own favorites were included, isn’t it? If so, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m not averse to posting a list of favorites from Via Negativa readers, as well. Or post your own list and I’ll link to it. Let a hundred canons bloom!

UPDATE: Readers’ picks

(From Elck)

Handwriting, by Michael Ondaatje. “In my opinion, leagues ahead of his earlier poetry.”

North, by Seamus Heaney – “or, who are we kidding, just about any of his books.”

The Star-Apple Kingdom (earlier) or Tiepolo’s Hound (later) by Derek Walcott. “Omeros left me unmoved.”

Fredy Neptune, by Les Murray. “A bold book-length keen/narrative . . . Very Aussie, very colloquial, and quite accomplished.”

(From Susan Susurra)

It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Charles Bukowski. “I suppose what I appreciate in that one is his wry self effacement. He can be so dark and crass and ruthless, I guess I feel a bit more comfortable when he is aiming at himself.”

“For Heaney I’d pick Death of a Naturalist for you, and borrow it when I’m in a happy mood, North for me when I’m in a state of melancholy and want a walk with stories of death.”

(From Dale)

The Walls Do Not Fall, by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

(From Butuki)

Turtle Island, by Gary Snyder

(From Siona)

Diving Into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Unkempt

The peculiar thing about these woods is their power to turn melodies into something else entirely. Yesterday afternoon, for instance: the sun hangs low in the treetops and gazing into it my mouth drops open, the tune I am whistling under my breath escapes and goes muttering off through the laurel. Two or three dried leaves turn over in their sleep. A dog barks in the distance.

No music can ever be stopped, because time can’t be stopped. Or so it seems to me at the moment. I am standing with the brow of the hill behind me, watching as the silhouettes of trees grow darker by the minute within their shining outlines. I have it within my power to freeze this moment forever in a poem, I say to myself. But it isn’t true.

I listen for a while to the footsteps of a deer that seems to be in no particular hurry. At one point I hear the high, keening sound of a cedar waxwing up in the treetops, followed a moment later by a chickadee. From this bend in the trail I can travel in imagination on through the stand of large old oaks, past the clump of sapling beeches, above the wild grape tangles where the whirring arrows of ruffed grouse stirred up from the laurel so often lodge.

It doesn’t seem necessary to keep walking, though. I have the strong impression all of a sudden that everything is in its place. I remember the title of an early book by Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, which I like better than any other line or poem he’s ever come up with. A house held is a house kept clean – but what does cleanness mean, any more, in a world full of man-made chemicals with no analogue in nature?

Let’s talk about neatness, then, about straightening up. Each natural community, each portion of the land has its own ideas about keeping house: right here, for example, it says both fire and ice, trees and deer and steaming gutpiles. The top carnivores are missing, so we humans have to do the best we can without them.

The previous day’s high winds brought down numerous dead snags and rotten limbs. It amazes me how often a large tree can crash down without major injury to any of the trees around it. I remember years ago the reaction of one of our visitors – a very urbane intellectual from Lima, Peru – to the sight of a line of broken-down locust trees left by a recent ice storm: How are you going to fix them? he wanted to know. And some time before that, our elderly neighbor, who had grown up with an even-aged forest, told my father that the growing number of logs on the forest floor didn’t look right, especially if they happened to span the stream. The woods are so messy now, she complained, a few years after the gypsy moth caterpillars came through and sped things up a bit. Yes. And the stream would never again flow as quietly as it did through the monotonous pole-timber of her youth.

Out in Ohio, a dear friend of the family, a life-long nature lover, rails at the way her daughter insists on tidying up the woods behind her suburban home, picking up all the fallen branches, cleaning out the brush. The irony is that they have a big bird feeder and enjoy watching wildlife. The same daughter goes on periodic shopping sprees for clothes, then gives almost everything she buys to Goodwill or the Salvation Army because it would make her closets too messy if she tried to keep it all. Ah, charity.

To me, the messier the woods get, the more inviting they become. A young, even-aged forest has little to offer in terms of habitat, either for wildlife or for the imagination. Songs die somewhere down in the throat. On a late afternoon in early winter, with the clean outlines of aging trees against a sky blue to the horizon, I am reminded of water spilling over fallen logs or waves on a lake lapping against half-submerged hulks along a ragged shore. The impeded stream is the one that sings, Wendell Berry once pointed out.

Back up and along the edge of the spruce grove I go, admiring the three-inch-high forest of ground cedar that covers close to half an acre there. The eastern ridge and the mountains beyond glow orange-red in the setting sun. I find one of our hunter friends sitting against a tree, his rifle resting on his lap, at the edge of an area where my father cleared out the trees two years ago to preserve the view. Charlie’s younger son, who died in a automobile accident at the age of 17, used to still-hunt in this very spot.

I return his wave but am careful to keep silent. It strikes me that all the while I stood facing west he had been sitting here on the other side of the hill, facing east and seeing things he will probably never speak of to anyone. If and when Charlie gets a deer and has it butchered and stacked neatly in labeled packages in the freezer, every time he fries up a steak it will remind him of this afternoon and others like it: the quiet, the moving light, the thoughts that came and went of their own accord. Between the two of us, I think, we kept a pretty careful watch over things. If there were any motes of dust, I would have seen them.
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A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Housekeeping and Place.