Memoir – Page 11 – Via Negativa

January 6, 2009 by Dave Bonta

A Gift of Chalk

Día de los Reyes Magos, 2009

My friend L. once gave me a box
of white chalk the approximate size
& shape of a pack of cigarettes.
What’s this, I asked. Well, if someone
comes up & asks you for a cigarette,
she said, you could give him
a piece of chalk. O.K., thanks, I said,
& stuck it absent-mindedly in
my backpack. Just now, rummaging
in the bottom of the pack for a book,
I found it again. It took me a second
to remember where it had come from.
A mouse had gotten in at some point
& nibbled a small hole in the top
of the box, but the twelve chalks were all
still unbroken. Development Through
Creativity, says the Crayola logo,
as if there were any other way.
Makes clean, smooth lines & erases
easily, it says on the back,
& suddenly I have a strong urge
to go out & draw something on
the sidewalk, something with clouds
& white orchids, polar bears, paper
birches, skeletons, dandelion seedheads,
albino deer with great branching antlers,
waterfalls, waterlilies, the Milky Way—
all with the smoke from elegant
faux cigarettes. But it’s dark out now,
& winter. Sleet ticks against
the window, & the walk is buried
under a fresh half-inch of white.

December 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

When the world goes plunk

You’ve heard about bolts from heaven. This was a lug nut. It pierced the windshield of my parents’ Nissan Pathfinder and slammed into the passenger seat where my mother had been sitting a short time before. Dad pulled over to the side of the road and looked back — there’d been no overpass. The only other vehicle on his side of the freeway was a Winnebago a quarter-mile ahead.

The guy at the shop said sure, that could’ve spun off the wheel of an RV. Just bad luck that it happened to come down right where you were. No — I said when I heard about it — it’s good luck, excellent luck! If Mom had still been sitting there, she could’ve been killed.

This is the kind of logic by which a sailor who loses his leg to a shark gets nicknamed Lucky Pete. It might mark me as an optimist, were it not for the fact that my dour realist side tends to get the last word: Luck had nothing to do with it. There’s no way Mom could’ve been there, since the purpose of the drive had been to deliver her to a conference, which Dad had already done when the incident occurred. And in any case the whole notion of luck represents an absurd attempt to project consistent, self-centered narratives onto chaotic, impersonal events. Unless, of course, you believe some kind of divine conductor is running the show, in which case the language of luck would be even more inappropriate, and you’d better get right with Jesus/Allah/whoever right now if you don’t want to be S.O.L. come Judgement Day.

That happened several years ago. The lug nut from heaven may have missed my mom by a mile — several miles, in fact — but as a fervent environmentalist her faith in the apocalypse remains unshaken. Just last night, in fact, we were talking about the old manual typewriter I keep under my writing table Just In Case. Mom said she thought that was an excellent idea. “At least when the world goes plunk,” she said, “we’ll be able to keep writing!”

“Wait. What? When the world goes plunk? Are you telling us that the sound the apocalyse makes is PLUNK?” My brother and I cracked up. “Yeah, you know — plunk!”

O.K., maybe it was more of a descriptive thing than straight onomatopoeia, but I like it either way. There’s such finality in it. It’s a quarter hitting the wall, dice hitting the table, a poker hand being laid down. It’s the sound of the clock running out on the game, or the numbers sliding into place on an old, pre-digital scoreboard at the ball park. It’s the sound of something small and ordinary landing in a totally unexpected place.

And when the world does finally go plunk, that machine-gun sound you’ll hear next, punctuated by bell-like dings? That’s my mom, continuing to type.

Don’t forget to check out qarrtsiluni’s Journaling the Apocalypse issue, now in its last ten days of publication. We won’t be posting anything tomorrow or Thursday, so this might be a good time to catch up.

December 17, 2008February 19, 2013 by Dave Bonta

First Smoke

man smoking cigarette through a four-foot-long holder
Photo by Yale Joel for Life magazine

Little smoky thumb, how
I’ve missed sucking on you!
My head floats on its stem
like a flower that’s just been pollinated.
In the seven years
since I broke the habit,
every cell in my body has been
replaced at least once, but
my fingers still remember
exactly what to do, juggling
the huggermuggery of matchbook
& rolling paper, ashtray & ash.
What other parts of my new/old body
have inherited secret flaws?
With growing detachment
I watch the thing go gray
as I draw the glowing life out of it,
picturing the road in Japan
where I’d stood 21 years ago,
having just placed the very first one
between my lips & wondering what
the hell to do next.

December 7, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Offers

Once at a party, a Japanese composer offered to teach me how to play the harpsichord if I would tutor his daughter in English.

One night on a city bus in Austin, a man smuggling gasoline back to his stranded vehicle offered me a job hanging drywall.

Another time, a fellow cook in a restaurant where I worked offered to make me his partner in a subcontracting company. I told him I didn’t know anything about construction, but he assured me it didn’t matter. I know all the local mafia guys, he said. I can guarantee we’d get the winning bids.

Back in 1990, a Chinese friend offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to mainland China. The only catch was I had to marry someone, a dissident, and convince the INS it was a genuine marriage so she’d get a green card.

Hard to remember all the times I’ve been offered redemption of one kind or another: redemption of the soul, redemption of the body. I was never in the market for Jesus or heroin, but sometimes it’s been difficult to turn down an offer of physical intimacy, especially after too many drinks. No, I’d say, but I’m a writer. I’ll listen all night if you’d like to talk.

Five years ago on a dating site, someone offered no-strings-attached sex. There are always strings, I said.

Outside a Greyhound bus station in Columbus, Ohio, I was offered $50 if I would stand there for an hour and do nothing. It sounded good — nothing is what I do best. But the fellow added that at a certain point someone would approach and ask whether I was Roger, and I’d have to say yes. My name is Carl, I said.

November 21, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Flagging

I wonder sometimes about the flag people. Not the ones who hang out the American or Confederate flags — though I wonder about them sometimes too — but the ones whose flags signal more personal allegiances: flowers, or songbirds, or autumn leaves. I don’t think they’re making a political statement, though I suppose it’s possible. It’s not a hippie thing. The only statement I think they’re making is, “Yay spring!” or “Yay autumn!” as the case may be.

I can’t see myself ever following suit — it’s not really my style, and besides, if I hung out a flag, it couldn’t not make a statement. I’m the kind of anarchist who would sooner burn a black flag then follow it, so that option’s out. But I think I know what I would put on a flag, should I ever get the urge to drape one off my porch: a dandelion.

Every spring when I was a kid, we gathered dandelion greens from the lawn. For a week or two before the flower stalks appeared, their bitterness was still bearable, even pleasant, as long as they were boiled with bits of bacon and dressed with salt and vinegar. We’d go out picking after a rain so we wouldn’t have to clean them much. It was work to separate out all the tiny blades of grass, but the novelty of gathering food from the lawn never wore off.

Years later, a Swedish naturalist came to visit, a man who specialized in dandelion taxonomy, among other things. Our common birds filled him with delight; he got a look of utter transport every time an American robin sang. And he kept falling to his knees at unexpected junctures, because the dandelions were in bloom. Where we saw constellations of familiar suns, he kept finding brand new genotypes.

Once when I was drunk on dandelion wine at a raucous party in a house where I had lived the year before, a giant of an ex-marine grabbed me by the throat and threw me against the wall. My glasses flew off. All that giddy gold in my veins flash-froze. A friend came over and won my release with a tap on the giant’s shoulder and an ear-splitting grin, but by then I was sober, and the house had ceased to resemble any home I knew.

A few hours later, I ran into some people from the party. Why hadn’t I raised a finger in self-defense, they wanted to know, and all I could say was, it wasn’t in me. I had felt too good; every muscle had been relaxed. When dandelions get good and pollinated, they fall prostrate among the grass: lawnmowers won’t touch them, except on the lowest setting. And by the time they straighten up again, they’re ready for whatever might come their way. Their newly spherical heads have the power to transform blows into catalysts of wonder and delight — not to mention regeneration.

On second thought, who needs a flag? Maybe I should design a personal coat of arms.

November 15, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Contact

The rain woke me
tapping on the window
reminding me of a boyhood friend

I never had who’d toss gravel
against the glass until I eased
myself out crept to the edge

of the porch roof & shimmied
down the walnut’s rough trunk
I did that a few times even

without the prompt
someone might be out there
it was worth checking

& something always was
I’d hear rapid footsteps on the lawn
a rustle in the compost pit

I’d climb into bed half an hour later
with dirt on my feet & grass
stains on my PJs breathing hard

pull the blankets over my head
& listen to the blood drumming
behind my ears

November 10, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Bearings

I took my bearings from
a tattered map taped to a lamppost
turned left at the inside-out umbrella
propped against a dumpster
& continued straight past
the strip malls
& the self-storage units

until I reached open ground
contoured with corn stubble
a crow on pond ice
the blue trees of distance

I walked into the wind
sleet stinging my face
& shook my head at every driver
who pulled alongside & gestured to get in
this was where I’d been going
I was looking for a reason
to turn back

September 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Back to School

I enter town by an alley off the railroad adjoining the parking lot for G&R Excavating and Demolition — “The Professional Homewreckers,” they call themselves. “No Job to Big or Small.” Sic. Walking into town on a quiet Sunday morning to use my sister-in-law’s computer, my route takes me along the railroad tracks and under I-99, where the 35-year-old overpass is undergoing extensive reconstruction. Workers have wrapped the massive steel girders with chainlink fence and covered that with burlap. It reminds me of a pupating caterpillar, the difference being of course that when it emerges from its chrysalis it will still be a highway bridge. I glance back at the end of our mountain, and see that it’s topped by a wisp of cloud that belies its diminuitive elevation: the sun-struck forest exhaling into the crisp morning air.
Continue reading “Back to School”

August 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Bequest

My great great aunt Mary, stern unmarried schoolteacher from the hard-coal country of eastern Pennsylvania where all my mother’s people hail from, gave each of us boys when we were small a figurine carved from anthracite. Mine was a book, closed up like a sandwich and unmarred by any words, either on the cover or the spine. One of the others was a three-inch mug; I forget the third. Our parents put them away in the china closet, saying they were fragile and we could have them when we grew up. They therefore took on all the characteristics of a bequest.

Despite these precautions, at some point the book of coal got dropped, I forget by whom, and one of the corners sheared off — a clean break. Dad glued it back together with epoxy. I keep it now in a little shrine I made from an antique cabinet television. It keeps company with a bowl of plastic fruit, an empty syringe, the skeleton of a mouse, and a pitcher full of spent bullet casings. I might like it better for being cracked, and for fitting so perfectly in the palm of my hand. I rap on it now and then for good luck. It was wood once.

August 23, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Haunting the bell

Improbable doorways, hello. I’m walking off a drunk — a stagger-stepped and deliberate go at keeping the ground in its place. Down the deserted road two miles, growing steadily more sure-footed, then left through the sleeping village and around the gate into Ikkyu’s old temple, which I’ve explored several times by daylight.

Nothing stirs. The white gravel path is just visible, and I crunch past the meditation hall. I approach the bell in its hillside hanger, an immense shadow in the shape of an inverted sake cup. I stab its three-ton chest with my big finger. Hey! You think you so smart? You come to my temple, at Shao-lin!

No answer. I crouch down, remembering the Noh play where a monk leaps into a bell to escape a serpent. I crab-walk under, then cautiously stand, groping the cold metal.

The ancient bell is noisy with breathing. Startled, I bang my head, and there’s the faintest of reverberations, echoing for several heartbeats. This is not a hat, I whisper. A hat. A hat.