Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Horizontal

it’s easy to stop seeing
what’s on the horizon

people in the valley
don’t really believe in it

what summer makes seem
no less than a mountain

winter shows as it is
no more than a hill

from my front porch
a sudden influx of sky

after the leaves fall
look it’s snowing

the flakes come to settle
in their multitudes

well into the evening
lightness piling up

between the trees
no more omnivorous earth

but a colony of the clouds
pale and puritanical

against which the individual
trunks stand out

an absent crowd
dreaming

together
underground

and after my own sleep
i rise and look again

on the underside
of a snowy limb

a gray squirrel is walking
upside-down

Posted on by Dave Bonta

First snow

My camera took this photo today and I absolutely love it. I don’t know, it just feels like my digital equivalent of a Rothko or something.

I think it may have been a close-up of one of these blackberry leaves:

Yes, it was our first snowfall of the year. We got three more inches around dusk. Sleep-deprived as I was, it was wonderful to amble around the mountain watching winter lay down its first blank page.

One thing to be said for all that blankness: my photo files are smaller! Fewer leaves mean less data—in more ways than one, of course.

Winter days are strange in how quickly the magic can come and go. You have to be ready. The power went out midday when I was a mile and a half from the houses, watching the first flakes sift down through bare branches. Power cuts are common but there’s only one first snow of the season so I took my time getting back. Just as I was about to hook up jumper cables to Mom’s ailing generator, she hollered that the lights were on.

So back out I went, after making some hot chocolate and putting it in a thermos to have up in the memorial grove. Delightful to watch it snow from under the spruces. It was Dad who taught me how to make cocoa—one of his few culinary specialties apart from blueberry buckwheat buttermilk pancakes and soft-boiled eggs.

And then another slow wander through another portion of the forest. I justified part of it as walking the property line, a good thing to do during deer season. I only saw one set of deer prints, but that’s to be expected. They’re laying up. What kind of idiot goes out in a snowstorm?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Remains of the Night

the moon falling into a well
and not coming out

an 18-wheeler on an exit ramp
gargling with compressed air

the owl’s open eye
the owl’s closed eye

the hypothetical fact of a fox
a rumor of a coyote

the skillet under two eggs
sunny side up

familiar recorded music
the bits that still surprise

my heel where i landed hard
on a sharp stone yesterday

snag of a hemlock
its roots becoming tunnels

groundwater feeding the stream
feeding the sewage plant

a patched railroad track’s
bright seam of weld

my attempt to see contrails too
as kintsugi

giving each other side-eye
at the polling place

the basket of black
ballpoint pens

hand-colored cards
feeding the machine

afterwards a storm drain cover’s
iron mandala

the condemned building
its quartzitic foundation stones

the shallow pits
where they were quarried

high on the mountainside
traffic roaring below

my lungs laboring
non-stop for 56 years

sap congealed in globs
on black cherry bark

seeming to have a taste
in the way good water does

remembering nothing of my dreams
i chew and chew

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Time Lines

and the deer came
on long legs between the trees

and clashed antlers with a sound
old and dry as the wind

gnats danced as if
summer had returned

for one day only
everything must go

through a gray mist that may
have been in my head

i measured the mountain
with my body pacing it out

i walked among birches
nothing but blank pages

overtook milkweed
giving birth to clouds

looped past the wild gravevines
their convolutions laid bare

following the bed
of an old coal railroad

with the leaves mostly down
saw far below

the remains of a car wheels-up
among deer-tongue grass

abandoned halfway through
the age of fishes

when seas saved
the mud of ancestral mountains

for 62 million years
until a mass extinction

getting younger
as i climbed

into the age of amphibians
and giant dragonflies

pressed into rock by later layers
now sloughed off

and the horizon opened like a rose
on ever more mountains

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Into the Open

an empty space is still data
my phone reminds me

no space is truly empty
a falling leaf reminds me

the time of long shadows
has come ‘round again

cedar waxwings whistle
through bare branches

the low sun catches on wings
in lieu of leaves

rests in a red oak
undressing in the wind

and flickers like an angel
resisting temptation

to follow the leaves down
spinning spiralling

or rocking back and forth
like a cradle

if only i could sleep
and leaf out when i wake

clinging to hope makes us
as empty as the future

let the earth take
its own sweet time

let this glory
be enough

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Grace

buzzing on the autumn mountain
an amber alert

a child gone missing
in the middle of my daydream

railroad workers 400 feet below
pause and look at their phones

every morning now
it’s a different landscape

i go home and cut my hair
the missing girl is found

two notes from a wren
get lodged in my inner ear

***

Photo and poem from one week ago.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Forestry

morning of soft sun
and old gold

with the distant yelping
of trucks going backwards

the sound of limestone
being ground down

and a silent jay
going from oak to oak

throat pouch filled with acorns
it flies off east

i follow animal paths
into the afternoon

*

a gray squirrel buries an acorn
under a laurel bush

sees me watching
and digs it up again

silk threads scintillate
wherever i look toward the sun

each lowbush blueberry
bound to the next

as if the whole forest
lay under a spell

a chipmunk rushes past
i change hats

*

low sun in the tops
of the Norway spruces

where golden-crowned kinglets
whistle while they glean

a raven’s hoarse
ark ark ark

and me pondering questions
of macroeconomics

puffball ragged as
a faceless old doll’s head

what fertile words of smoke
would you have me spread

*

when the leaves fall
there’s always some disillusionment

how much lower
all the ridgelines

how much farther
the shell of a moon

but i’ve been tallying
the mountain’s sugar maples

pale as columns of breath
moss-lipped

ringed by drifts
of glowing jetsam

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poem Beginning with a Line by Farough Farrokhzad

let us believe in the ruined
gardens of imagination

even in autumn rain
there’s still such radiance

leaves underfoot whisper
my wishbone song

really just a rhythm imposed
on the slow fires of decay

but now church bells
make for a glistening listen

the dead have nothing
and everything to do

with the emptiness
of numbers

their carnival is upon us
scarlet oaks glowing

on a mountainside
of charred pine stumps

witch hazels dangling
sun-colored sex flags

and a woodpecker sounding
like a clown on amphetamines

my phone can find
the bleakest news in seconds

a shaggy mane mushroom
dissolves into ink

Posted on by Dave Bonta

End Times

i am not ready for
a light-filled forest

still half aflame
i struggle to recognize it

with thinning hair
comes the chill of loss

i finger a nickel
that slaveowner’s face

riding in my pocket
like i’m lewis and clark

under red and scarlet oaks
the music of falling acorns

tick-tocking but only
at random moments

i clock in at several
caught breaths an hour

a forest can turn to coal
in the fullness of time

and those who believe in hell
can dig it up and burn it

with faith all things
acquire an airbrushed glow

but when mountains move
there’s a detachment fault

beneath which other rocks
go their own way

i sit watching
the treetops glow

in sun that they can
no longer taste

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Lookout

You have to drive quite a ways to escape the sound of traffic. In the end, though, there’s no getting around it: you have to get out and walk. I follow an almost vanished trail to a high point called Penn Lookout where the scenic vista long since grew in. I have the former picnic area all to myself. It’s too far from the road. When I snap a photo of the low light through the trees, the camera shutter startles in the silence.

fall colors
a yellowjacket’s
unsteady flight