I mean I think it’s a junkyard, but what if it’s really an art installation?
On the other side of the interstate, there’s a mountain. The highway department puts up a chain-link fence to keep it at bay.
Interstatement
The Unlearning
first let go of the obscurer wildflowers
the quadratic formula
the plots of novels
you’ll never read again
it gets easier the less
you cling to things
do you need to know for example
how to make fire
or small talk
or change
the stomach forgets milk
feet forget the ground
eventually one surrenders
time itself
to the blur of eternity
a cat sleeping in the sun
while the livestock settle
moaning into their stalls
No taste like home
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.
Insurgent, portentative
I’m walking past ranks of even-aged red pines with a native broadleaf forest rising in the understory to a height of some thirty feet now: a visually striking natural insurgency against the industrial monoculture. Molting birds skulk through the dense foliage while a hermit thrush still sings just up the hill. A very small brown and white feather floats down.
*
If i didn’t know that these mushrooms were poisonous, would I still find them repulsive? Yeah, probably. The death angel looks delicious — which apparently it is. Then it dissolves your liver.
*
One of those days when even the rocks sweat and the biting insects form clouds dense enough to block the sun, and here I am circling a bog. My addiction to walking is beginning to seem nearly pathological, even to myself. But here’s the thing: I’m having a blast.
Oh what a lovely breeze!
Say, are those storm clouds?
hemlock sapling
bound in red surveyor’s tape
how hot it is
*
Why would I slog through a buggy bog, you ask? That’s where the prettiest mud is.
***
Portentative
sky face says meh
to the white noise
of our anti
bodies of work
squeezing whole lives
into a few hours before sleep
while six-legged leaves
chant half the night
sky face acquires
a round cloud mouth
the moonlight denies
ever knowing the moon
the lives we’re missing bloat like corpses
as species dwindle
sky face is just the void
with better branding
Fog walker
“Oh hey, buddy, how’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s GOING!”
Uproarious laughter. Two old friends at the small-town deli. I resist the temptation to turn around and look, but they seem genuinely surprised and impressed to find themselves still in the land of the living, still doing everyday things.
“I was just coming back from Surplus City, and I thought I’d STOP IN and PICK SOME THINGS UP!” Laughter.
“OH yeah! Good IDEA!” More laughter.
They’re probably no more than 15 years older than me, if that: a glimpse into my own future, perhaps. If I’m lucky. Artists and writers court amazement all day long with less evident success than these geezers at the store.
***
My favourite ridgetop tea-drinking spot is quieter each time I visit. Gone (or hiding while they molt) are the nesting tanagers and warblers. A wood pewee still calls, and a blue-headed vireo interjects at one point, but that’s about it. A nearby black gum has begun to color up, anticipating early migration and the need for signal flags saying FREE LUNCH.
fog walker
the millipede’s carpet
of legs
I take it back: both the black-throated green warbler and the robin who nested nearby are still around, just rarely singing. Sit here long enough and you’ll hear everything—or at least everything audible over the trains and traffic sounds from the valley. Now it’s an annual cicada calling just once and falling silent again. The sun comes half out. I see from my shadow it must be nearly eleven.
closed book
in my lap
a square of sunlight
***
The biggest change in literary blogging over the past 20 years has been the demographic shift from relatively younger to relatively older poets. In part of course that’s because some of the same contingent of people who were blogging in the aughts still dominate the literary blogging space. But there have been many more late adopters for whom blogging was a good fit, because as older writers, they’re not necessarily as ambitious. Meanwhile, today’s young poets are not blogging because that’s no longer seen as hip, and also because they are focusing all their efforts on writing for publication elsewhere. If they blog, it is purely to share writing or publishing news. I don’t write for a living and i’ve never been very ambitious, so blogging is an easy, nearly frictionless way to get my writing out there—especially these experiments in sorts of writing that very few publishers are interested in: absurdly long erasure poetry projects, weird tone-shifting hodgepodges masquerading as zuihitsu, that sort of thing.
The Xerox era was fun, and I’m glad I got to participate in the tail end of it, even publishing my first three chapbooks that way under the imprint Free Lunch Press (which I’m sure wasn’t original, but we didn’t have the web, much less Google yet, just small press directories that only included people organized enough to submit their info—not half-assed schmucks like us).
But this is better.
***
I found a black cherry tree dotted with congealed sap (above)—the original chewing gum. Though actually they dissolve fairly quickly. They’re rubbery and gelatinous and nearly tasteless. Which to me makes them highly attractive for extreme culinary purposes, should I ever be called upon to produce an Appalachian delicacy. Ya know, marinate in sassafras root bark infusion, drizzle with maple syrup and boom, you’ve got an appetiser to go with your mountain mint julep.
***
The biggest sign that Anglo-American civilization is doomed: the precipitous decline in shared mealtimes. If we can’t break bread together even as families, meaningful dialogue is clearly at an end. And what is culture about if not dialogue? Even the most solitary artist is still in dialogue with the greats.
Mission creep
i watch from under
my umbrella
the complexly bladed ferns
dancing erratically in the rain
my feet and their forever
war on stasis
the ruts reasserting themselves
through fresh stone
i was only going
for a walk and now
i’m pondering the obligations of ferns
the prerogatives of feet
and the way a green tongue
snakes through everything
as if wisdom grew on trees
as if it were made of gray paper
a head-sized tumor
emitting hornets
or the way rain beads
on a jewelweed leaf
unable to find purchase
on such a smooth skin
it rolls and gathers
into the veins
microcosms
in capsule form
my pace slows
to a creep
Unmasquerade
a mask needs eyes but not too many
the night sky for example has far too many eyeholes while an ampersand may not have enough
the best masks have growth rings and crows’ feet and need to be read to every night before bed
a mask is alive the way a dead stump is alive: teeming with transients
it’s there for you the way god or a cat is: for as long as you keep filling its bowl
its first word will take the shape of a silverfish
Summer holiday
in one summer how many
generations of aphids
chicory blueing the roadside
where a drive-in used to be
and the spindly trees
that stand in for angels
their green blades
for carving up the sun
so much more than we know
grows in a summer
sporangia like eyestalks
seedpods like space ships
and the mountaintop bleeds orange
where coal was stripped out
but we climb with
our mouths open
salsify achenes in a blowball
one by one wobble and break free
a wild grape tendril
proffers an ampersand
Knifeless knife
hot summer night
itching even where
nothing itches
***
wind from the west the sound of metal striking metal
***
I found a knife in the woods. Or more accurately, I found an old, tooled leather sheath for a knife with the remains of a hilt sticking out of it.
The top of the hilt was the only thing visible; the knife had been stuck into the ground, wedged between a couple of rocks. The way you’d hide something if you meant to come back for it later: inconspicuous, but not completely invisible. It’s on the far side (from us, toward the valley) of the higher ridge, near a stand of old sassafras trees where I sometimes dig sassafras roots, so it’s tempting to think the knife had something to do with that. But more likely it was used by someone poaching deer.
I love how fungal it is, already half-transformed back into earth. I returned it to its hiding place so the process can continue.
Midday heat
midday heat
the slow downward spiral
of a leaf
*
black butterfly
wings still damp
from the tomb
*
cooling breeze
the black-throated green warbler’s
other song