red and gold
on the far shore toward which
our flowers float
your ashes sinking
deeper into the sky

i.m. Heidi Myers Suydam Burke

See also Four tanka

orange leaves
lost in fog
a tree frog peeps

bracken ferns
bleached as old bones
quiver in the rain

pores open
nostrils flare

for the heaven-scent
of ground
after drought

raindrop-
dislodged leaves
flutter down

between rain-
darkened trunks
like bright feathers

as if from
a bird of fire
hidden in the clouds

the rain thickens
drowning out
all other sound

but when percussion
rushes too much
it turns to mush

you could stew in a tin-
roofed house
and listen

treetops rocking
together   apart
in the wind
the too-early chill
of a cousin’s death

*

curled red tongue
of a fallen leaf caught
by a dead twig
without even trying
if dying is an art

*

losing its bark
a rock oak killed
by spongy moths
given over to fungus
sprouts a golden mane

*

autumn’s here
in orange and yellow
black gum leaves
and this world has one fewer
voice raised in praise

summer’s end
a bumblebee embracing
all the petals

*

morning spider making way into wait

*

The two most recent posts from my photoblog, Woodrat photohaiku. If you’d like more of this kind of thing, there’s an emailed version you can subscribe to, just as with Via Negativa, The Morning Porch, and my writer’s blog, DaveBonta.com (which bizarrely has more subscribers than the photoblog). I generally post a couple dozen times a year, more in the winter than in the summer.

tunnel vision
the darkness returning
each of our words

*

re-blogged from Woodrat Photohaiku

god of iron and war
carved from hard wood

Ogun with a gun propped
upright under his chin

on a Wednesday in June
behind museum glass

eyeholes turreted
in two directions

so no one can return
the ground-penetrating gaze

of a placeholder
for something more than mortal

the ore that reddens rocks
and makes them ring

something godlike
how with charcoal and bellows

iron can be made to bloom
for the blows of a hammer

how last night’s missiles
blazed across our screens

at what might well be
the very end of the Iron Age

in an empty gallery
with walls of marigold

Ogun casts two shadows
behind his back

Note to folks arriving here from a web search: This was essentially a post that got too long for Instagram. I was not able to spend hours researching everything my age-addled memory suggested ought to be the case. You should probably take it all with a grain of salt.

Thanks to my brother Mark making all the arrangements and doing all the driving, we made it to Fallingwater on Sunday for one of the early, in-depth tours, which I can’t recommend enough. Each tour guide, while following the general plan outlined by Edgar Kauffman Jr., is encouraged to focus on areas of their personal expertise, and we got a retired NYC designer who grew up in Johnstown for a cosmopolitan yet regionally attuned perspective.

They’re finally replacing the original concrete with a more robust, water-resistant composition that will mimic the original as closely as possible, a process expected to take two more years, I think the guide said. Although Frank Lloyd Wright was thoroughly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, he lacked the centuries of craft knowledge that informs traditional Japanese construction, concrete still being a fairly new material in 1936 (or newly revived – the Romans used concrete extensively, and it has lasted, but engineers have only recently learned the secrets of its composition).

The holes rusted through the top of that Buddha statue seemed Zen-like, somehow, and seeing the top floor wrapped in tarpaulins felt almost seductive, a veiling more like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap than a view obscured by clouds. But the old concrete looked sad. I don’t think that the wabi-sabi aesthetic is as relevant for Fallingwater as the complementary Japanese value of cleanness (kirei), though the two are often combined as kirei-sabi, ‘an idea that combines the purity of beauty (“kirei”) with the allure of time and imperfection (“sabi”)’ according to the Internet.

Like the copperhead snake we once encountered on nearby Ferncliff Peninsula—land donated to the commonwealth by the Kauffman family—the house needs to shed its skin. That’s what happens at the two most sacred Shinto shrines in Japan, where all the buildings are entirely, painstakingly replaced every hundred years. Someday, if I ever get back to Ise, it’ll be interesting if it’s in a more kirei-sabi state than it was in 1985, when it looked utterly pristine among the old-growth cypress trees.

Speaking of trees, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy is doing an impressive job of keeping the grounds looking ‘natural’: saving the eastern hemlock trees from woolly adelgids and excluding most invasive trees, shrubs and forbs, but the fantasy of living in harmony with nature seems increasingly threadbare as anthropogenic mass extinction looms.

In some ways, Fallingwater is a familiar Pennsylvania story: having a camp or cabin to retreat to is so common here, it’s contributed to extensive fragmentation of Pennsylvania wild areas, and to the extent that Fallingwater influenced that trend—and how could it have not, as instantly famous as it became—the Kauffmans might be thought to share some of the blame. But considering how much land they donated to the state to create Ohiopyle State Park, which kick-started an extensive state parks system that has become a model for many other states, I think to the contrary they were genuine conservation heroes, and I enjoyed learning more about them in an exhibition of well-edited home movies currently on display at the visitor center. Turns out they had a strong social conscience as well, and when the Depression hit, correctly understood their role in society (as our guide put it) and rather than laying anyone off, dramatically increased employment at their department store (Kauffmans in Pittsburgh). Then Edgar Jr. met an underemployed architect, and the rest is history.

More than anything, what I love when out hiking on the Allegheny Plateau is to climb among boulders of the Pottsville Formation, so it makes me happy that a world-famous architect fell in love with ‘Rocksylvania’ too, and that it revitalized his career and put him on the cover of Time. I’m grateful to the Kauffmans for the grace and generosity of their vision, and to the conservancy for being such good stewards of it. Long may Fallingwater continue to inspire with its message of reverence for the natural world.

All photos by me. Thanks to my mom, Marcia Bonta, for leading the way.

which naked branches make
a paper wasp’s antennae twitch

out scouting for a nesting place
hind legs outfitted in safety orange

at the top of an oak curled
like a scroll around its missing heart

two flickers perched a foot apart
engage in a bowing contest

a green sweat bee wallows
through the wind-blown hair on my arm

fresh from a blossoming shadbush
that bridal delicacy

a gnatcatcher’s two-note song
sounds both necessary and sufficient

i step aside for a dust-devil
made of dead leaves

it careens off for another hundred feet
and rises into the canopy

as if the devil intends to re-leaf
not with new growth but old

a project as certain to fail
as May Day will come

disoriented by the mass slaughter of innocents
or the world as so many assumed they knew it vanishing
one might resolve to live only in the present tense

one could pay attention for example to the constant embrace of clothes
how air and water flow around and also through us
the way sound waves break against our eardrums
the proprioceptive intelligence of the feet

all the machinery of being human humming away
even for humans who lose or misplace their humanity
they must retain a muscle memory of how to crawl
the ground by and large continues to hold them up
lightning fails to edit them out of the story
prayers do not curdle in their unremarkable mouths
they fish with gilded forks through a bitter stew

shielded by double-glazed windows from the calls of birds
and soon enough the thunderous love-songs of 17-year locusts
currently still as pale as an army of spirits
tunnelling up through roots and rocks and mud

falling into the open
mouth of silence
vulture shadows

circling among boulders
of off-white quartzite
grown long in the tooth

fingers of ice linger
in the afternoon shadow
on a rock-walled well

where my face looms
among the far more
circumspect trees

some of whom are dead
but still standing on wind-
toughened roots

others yet to succumb
to infestation or pestilence
late frost or drought

here in the east
we can rarely climb
out of our own lives

one cannot vanish
into the thin air afforded to clouds
or the eyebrows of insomniacs

those who like it cold
have nowhere to go but north
we’re all migrants now

and our first green is in uniform
an antispring of plants
no native bug will touch

descending the mountain
i weave through a thorn scrub
wrought by forestry

and trillions of dollars
swifter than thought
encircling the earth

the silence broken
by a blue-headed vireo
singing his slow dream