Category: Plummer’s Hollow

Where I grew up, and still live for part of the year. It’s located near Tyrone, Pennsylvania in the valley and ridge province of the Appalachians. Plummer’s Hollow Run drains into the Little Juniata, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Hollow Folk

without issue i can feel the forest
thicken within me

build up fuel and hunger
for that incendiary spark

ah to slash and burn
plow and harrow with my ancestors

or cut down the old giants
and replace them with windmills

deadly flowers scything
the air for migrants

our doom laid out
like a meal for ravens

fates intertwining like fingers
at a lovers’ leap

a mile and a half up a mountain hollow
under the green banners of the sun

I live above a crawl space
too poor for a cellar

my garden is a banquet
for slugs and meadow voles

the wild mountain mint hums
with solitary bees

Posted on by Dave Bonta

One-winged wasp

for sale:
wilderness
travel
trailer

wilderness is within you my friend

assuming you have a healthy gut microbiome

*

we live in a time of signs and wonders

known as the present moment. a moment in which a tiger swallowtail might be bugging off but you capture it anyway in a good-enough-for-the-internet photo on your phone

E.T. was prophesy man i mean look at us now we are all extra, extra terrestrial man, just always phoning home. I guess that’s what it means to be terrestrial

a log i’ve stepped over hundreds of times was garnished today with these distinctive-looking cup fungi which i have never seen before in my life

***

it’s interesting to consider how much or how little work the word “natural” does in a phrase such as “natural smoke flavor added”

***

mayapples may not ripen until August it turns out, on extremely rare occasions when the local wildlife doesn’t get to them first

tastes may vary but to me a mayapple tastes less like an apple than something that may or may not be made with apples—like a junk-food version of an apple, with a very different texture in the mouth

not at all bitter, like wild lettuce

but nothing i’m going to make a point of seeking out the way i go after sassafras for example

***

when i last saw her this one-winged wasp had walked all the way up to her nest in the rafters

*

walking up the road after dark to look at the stars, but the road is full of winking glowworms—how can the sky compete?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Saved by Death

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

watch on Vimeo

forest downpour heard
first in the treetops

i picture a cinematic
rain of arrows

or maybe small frogs
like the two in the road earlier

one still moving
the other just bones and wasps

i took picture after picture
on my phone which now

rests like a joey
in a dry pocket

soon the gravel road
is two torrents

and i am a turtle hunched
under poncho and umbrella

and half a heartbeat
behind the flash of lightning

a deafening crash
up where i would’ve walked

had i not stopped for death
and taken pictures

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Star attraction

If I ran a movie review site, nothing would get more than one star. Movies would compete for fractions of a star.

Times are lean. We could run out of stars.

No one could afford to live under such a dark sky. They’d go mad with loneliness.

I saw another fireball the other night. Spend time under the stars and you see things: fish, a bull, a hunter, you name it. It’s so liberating to realize thanks to modern astronomy that the universe isn’t about us.

That said, there is a gas giant in my guest bedroom. My older brother can’t help his stature or intestinal difficulties. In his religion, everyone gets their own universe someday—a classic Ponzi scheme if you ask me. But what if it’s true?

I think the opposite is more likely the case: everything is drifting farther and farther apart, into an ever emptier void. You can already see it happening. People have that distance in their eyes.

the high inhuman
shriek of a dying rabbit
4th quarter moon

(via Twitter)

***

Finally got a good look at the pair of red-breasted nuthatches who’ve been hanging out in the spruce grove all year, according to my younger brother, and presumably nesting. Like the red squirrel i got a good look at yesterday, they were right near Dad’s grave. The spot is beginning to feel a bit magical, I have to say. Currently there’s a bit of fresh rain-water in the reflecting rock. I’m sitting on the bench listening to the stuttering calls of Linne’s cicadas, “a steady pulsating rattle sounding like a saltshaker” as the Songs of Insects website puts it. They outnumber dog-day cicadas now, of which I’m hearing just two—that buzz-saw whine. I’m also hearing what sound like falling acorns, a very hopeful sign.

***

In my poetry i want to write about nature without breathlessness. Don’t know whether i always succeed. Sharing new poetry on social media is an essential part of my probably Quixotic quest to normalize talking about wildflower sightings and wildlife encounters in the same way people post about the latest books or movies they’ve consumed.

I suppose in time I’ll end up creating a personal iconography of favourite species and other natural phenomena, licensed by the ubiquity of the smart phone and modern search engines—hardly any reference is too obscure anymore. For all that the internet has diminished attention spans, it does still expand access to layers of context that previously would’ve escaped all but the most knowledgeable of readers.

***

Successful ideologies are those that promise more than they can deliver. That way their adherents are never forced to answer for their beliefs. Evangelical conservatism may soon be dead as a political force because its adherents actually achieved one of their main goals, and everyone else is horrified.

***

Somewhere in the world right now a 90-pound weakling is sitting beside a hotel pool writing an epic novel and a 300-pound man in a tiny basement apartment is sweating over a haiku.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Colibrí

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

1

ruby-throated hummingbird
fresh from the jewelweed

hangs in front of my mouth
like an unhoused question

I spread my fingers wide
skin wrinkles like old bark

2

I grew up climbing trees
hugging the trunks for dear life

or digging for treasure
at the old farm dump

that green- or purple-stained glass
that once held whiskey

3

buzzing from one bright
flame to the next

what rain-soaked radiance
precedes a fall

and where might petals unfurl
if we ever woke up

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Refined

having lost the off-
spring in your step

you stare mutely back
at whatever comes

on a gorgeous morning
on an old woods road

that is itself lost
disappearing into the forest

finding again
that old quarry

where a chipmunk
has sunk a shaft

and a giant millipede writhes
her road-self
coiling and uncoiling

it’s cold
a nail leaks rust onto a sign

and a wolf spider sits
on folded legs

as good a place as any
to wait for the sun

its bliss-body
of light to pass

through the leaves’ refineries
and yes
turn to sugar

***

Thought for once I’d share the observations and notes that went into this, since they’re still on my phone:

  • a doe who lost her fawn to a predator doesn’t run from us anymore, wandering along the woods edge in what looks like a fugue state
  • a cold wolf spider waiting for the sun or possibly death, whichever comes first. I nudge her: definitely still alive
  • a chipmunk has reopened its burrow in the gravel road, right in the middle of the streamside track
  • a giant millipede pauses to writhe, its road-self coiling and uncoiling
  • The thing about old woods roads that really attracts me to them is that most of them never had any other destination. They were built to haul out forest products: first, charcoal for iron and the iron itself (quarried near the base of the mountain), then tan bark (hemlock and oak), building stone, mining timbers (chestnut oak), gannister, pulpwood, etc. I may not like the extractive nature of these industries, but I do like the idea of the forest as source of good things where all roads end.
  • Narceus americanus, giant American millipede or iron worm (!) can live for up to 11 years in captivity! Also:
  • “Other millipede species may lay 20–300 eggs, but N. americanus lay just one egg in a nest made of chewed leaf litter and excrement. The female millipede will wrap herself around the egg and nest until it hatches several weeks later, producing a millipede with seven body segments and only three leg pairs. The number of body segments and leg pairs are increased with each molting, and there is no parental investment after egg hatching.” (Wikipedia)
  • a nail leaking rust onto the white no trespassing sign
  • chipmunk burrow at the edge of a well-used hiking trail
  • do photos make better writing prompts than notes? yes because that doesn’t risk overdetermining the shape of the poem
  • “One manifestation of Sambhogakaya in Tibetan Buddhism is the rainbow body. This is where an advanced practitioner is walled up in a cave or sewn inside a small yurt-like tent shortly before death. For a period of a week or so after death, the practitioners’ body transforms into a Sambhogakaya (light body), leaving behind only hair and nails” (Wikipedia)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wild things

So I’m standing here watering my garden, and a female hummingbird flies in and takes a shower in the spray, three feet away from my hand.

*

Many hours later, I flush two ruffed grouse. Together. For the first time in years—since West Nile Virus began decimating them about 15 years ago. Last winter I thought it likely that there were only two grouse on our entire, two-and-a-half mile long end of the mountain. Now there seem to be at least five. Perhaps they’re staging a comeback.

Two unusual wildlife sightings in one day! I’m a lucky man.

***

As long as I live, I’ll never forget the sight of hundreds of university students walking past a low-hanging oak limb on which an adult male red-tailed hawk was ripping apart a gray squirrel, and not one of them so much as slowing down to watch. And that was at least ten years before the rise of smart phones. It was around that time I realized that nothing I would recognise as poetry will ever reach a mass audience in this distracted age.

***

What if my next poetry collection included all my voices, not just a few of them? Perhaps it would be an unreadable mishmash. But if there’s a uniform focus or addressee, it might work. Hmm.

Maybe I should also be a little less concerned about what an audience might prefer until closer to the end of the project? Behave less like a craftsman or entertainer and more like an artist? I don’t know about that. It challenges my populist instincts.

But you’re talking about wild words. The wild is not and will never be popular. See above.

***

Suspense

You are waiting for the next thing to be popular so you can admit how much you’ve come to loathe the last thing. But with this economy, who knows whether there will even be a next thing? That last thing might be the last thing ever, in which case you will someday come to miss it with all the fervent conviction of nostalgia.

tea for two
the ant holding a crumb
above her head

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ragged claws

On a day of incomparable beauty the past wells up within me and I am grateful for the kindness of shadows. The sun is bright but not hot; it feels like autumn. An indigo bunting lets spill its usual headlong song, but this late in the season and up in the woods, most likely it’s already on the move.

using the phone
as a mirror — how little
sky it holds

*

where the oak split off from its lost half open mouthed

***

Re-reading Prufrock, as one does. The line “There will be time, there will be time” catches me right in the feels. Also “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” is excellent. The whole poem strikes just the right balance between repetition and surprise. Still fun on the tongue. Five stars, would read again.

***

The literature is riddled with absences.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

***

The difference between what you tell yourself about what you’re doing and your true motivations can be a fruitful place to explore, but too much self knowledge isn’t always advantageous. Lying to myself about my true motivations was absolutely key to quitting tobacco back when I was in my mid 30s, for example. I didn’t admit to myself that I’d actually quit for years.

moon-eyed—
one cloud
at a time

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bluesy outsider chaotic spider trip

This morning on my walk I was pondering the question of why, when I was going through my first heartbreak back in my early 20s, I burrowed so deep into blues music to the almost complete exclusion of country western. Unlike most of my contemporaries I didn’t grow up listening to rock; my parents were into classical and a bit of folk (The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives), and my older brother played old-time banjo. So the first time I heard Delta blues guitar, I didn’t think “Wow, that sounds just like the Rolling Stones!” but “Wow, that sounds just like a clawhammer tune in a modal key!” Which, as I discovered years later when a friend lent me a Smithsonian Folkways compilation of very early recordings of Black string bands, is pretty much how that music evolved.

So that’s why I was prepared to like the country blues, but doesn’t explain why I ignored country western. Too schmaltzy, I always said, but that wasn’t fair to many country singers who avoid the schmaltz. Really, I think it was just that I preferred the more stoic and tough-minded approach to the expression of emotion in blues lyrics compared to the typical display of emotional vulnerability in country music.

And that too reflects how I was raised: in a loving but somewhat emotionally repressed family where it was exceedingly uncommon for anyone to ever talk about their feelings.

Also, virtually every traditional bluesman or woman I’ve ever read an interview with, when asked to define the blues, included in their answer the contention that blues is medicine. I can personally vouch for that. For a young person, at any rate, it was a mighty salve. In part I’m sure that was because so much of how we relate to each other, sexually and otherwise, has been fundamentally shaped by Black culture, with blues and rock lyrics as a major conduit. Blues and jazz changed the entire tenor of our civilization, made us freer and I believe also happier. Or at least a lot less sad.

These days though I don’t listen to much blues, and I’m not sure why. Music isn’t the all-powerful drug it was in my 20s and 30s. I’ve spent too many years listening to “the music of what happens.” John Cage was on to something. There’s music pretty much everywhere if you choose to hear it that way. I doubt it has the healing power of the blues in and of itself, but the physical effort required to go outside and explore such music will keep you on your feet long after most other concert-goers have checked out.

***

I love the fact that one of the most important American poets for actually understanding America was half Japanese: Ai. Another had an English father and a Puerto Rican mother: William Carlos Williams. Maybe you have to be half outside, half inside to see a thing for what it is.

***

I’m watching a small, black wasp flying from leaf to leaf and walking in circles with her antennae down, a female ninja seeking her target: a caterpillar of just the right species to act as unwilling nursery and food source for her progeny.

There’s not much to say about this that hasn’t already been said, by Darwin among others appalled by this apparent refutation of any notion of a just or benign cosmic order: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars,” Darwin wrote in a letter to Asa Gray.

For me it’s horrifying—but also mentally liberating, because I find the idea of a benign cosmic order deeply oppressive. We are not all inside anything, or at least nothing we’ll ever be able to fully comprehend. Order is just another name for chaos. And chaos, as the example of ichneumon wasps shows, can be a real bitch.

But I’m charmed to see there’s a serious attempt underway to get people to refer to the Ichneumonidae as Darwin wasps.

*

Walking through a Pennsylvania forest in August is a great incentive to cultivate mindfulness: one moment of inattention and you’re wiping another spiderweb off your face. I bow to the spiders; they are my true teachers. The deer flies circling my head will do for an offering.

*

The thing I admire about birding is the regular reminder to look up. The waking at 5 am and squinting at things through binoculars, not so much. But treetops are just kind of inherently trippy to stare into. I think it has something to do with the shortage of oxygen associated with craning one’s neck.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

No taste like home

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

Standing on the high point of our property as the wind from a distant storm gives huge relief from the stifling humidity, just looking around I notice a box turtle fifteen feet away doing the same thing: stretching its neck all around, sampling the air.

I made a video haibun out of a similar sighting two years ago, of a box turtle on the other ridge appearing to enjoy the first rain after a long drought. These ridgetop turtles have to drink water when they can get it, so a summer storm or even the suggestion of one would be welcome, I’m sure, especially now that the seasonal pools have mostly dried up. (There had been one a couple hundred yards away from today’s turtle.)

When I approach the turtle for a picture it begins retreating into its gorgeous orange shell. How can one look so flashy and be so shy?

Rumbles of thunder. Lacking a shell to tuck myself into, I suppose I should begin heading for home.

***

Sitting on the veranda of my mom’s house just before supper, I saw a silver-spotted skipper land next to an old spot of white paint on the concrete and taste it with its proboscis. It flew over to another spot of paint and did the same thing, circled around and found one more paint spot to taste before careening off.