This entry is part 28 of 31 in the series April Diary
failure i love you i suckle you on my bile and on my melancholy
i see the above-ground hollow in the roots turned trunk of a black birch – that space where a rotting stump had stood — as a magnificent monument to failure
as i suppose we all are, safe perches for new sprouts, new rivers flowing upstream with sweet sap
but that stump had been an oak where now there are only birches and our failures outnumber the trees
our oceangoing freight outweighs the estimated mass of all living organisms in every ocean
the sickly sweet fumes of our failure have driven out all but the severest of angels in heaven
those with the fire and the brimstone
hiking for three hours before i sit down and take out my tea. i can’t have covered more than five miles in all that time, but who cares. it’s been a good ramble in the gloom
graupel starts falling as i walk the last mile back to the house
thinking a lot about likely ecological futures this afternoon. it occurs to me that one advantage native species have over generalist invaders is in many cases much more genetic variation — essential in a world where drought is followed by a flood year, freak storms become common and last and first frost dates vary wildly. if global trade significantly declines that will give native ecosystems a bit more breathing room, and the invaders will inevitably begin to decline as pests and diseases catch up with them
Japanese stiltgrass
or so i’d like to think
near the bottom of the hollow today, rolling up the road in the wind i spotted an actual tumbleweed, i think
another invasive species coming in via the railroad. i love trains, but.
further up the hollow in a side ravine i spotted what looked like a recent scent marking on a beech: scratch marks and i’m guessing urine.
bobcat?
and from a little further up, at the end of the last logger in Plummer’s Hollow‘s last skid trail before my parents finally got him stopped (as detailed in Mom’s book Appalachian Autumn) here are the only two sycamore trees in the hollow, growing about 50 feet apart, both sprouted right after the logging so around 1990
seeing that second one as a single individual and not conjoined twins so to speak
anyway that’s where my head was today and also by sheer coincidence my feet
i liked this stanza today from Zang Di:
Language lives secretly. It lives out life’s other flavors. Language waits for you to appear and permits other lives under the sun.
he’s got a point. without storytelling, without narratives, without song and poetry, we’d be forsaken in a way we can hardly imagine. our lives would shrink to the present moment in all its terrifying immediacy. but we take language so for granted, like fish take the sea for granted. who knows what other fantastic beasts this language of ours may yet harbor
This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April i can’t tell you what a thrill it’s been for me to listen from the morning porch to hermit thrush song, that most ethereal sound: imagine a woodwind made of crystal and inhabited by the ghost of a bell and you might get the idea
(i will never fully forgive TS Eliot for mischaracterizing hermit thrush song in “The Wasteland” which i see someone has written a paper on though as a non-academic it’s off limits to me. the quote is
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water
TS Eliot, “The Wasteland,” lines 356-358
which he justifies with a quote from the great ornithologist Frank Chapman in a note:
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats… Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated.
but nobody but Eliot himself seems to have called it that)
they’ve never nested up here as far as we know despite occasionally attempting to set up territories as this one seems to be doing. the last time it happened, in 2020 up around the vernal ponds, i watched wood thrushes chasing him, and Mark and I thought maybe the limiting factor for us isn’t that we’re too low in elevation (1600 feet) for hermit thrushes but that we’re not high enough to exclude wood thrushes which out-compete their cousins
anyway Mark first heard this one on the 16th so he’s a persistent bugger. if our theory is correct, we may eventually get them nesting up here if wood thrush numbers continue to decline. so i should be careful what i wish for because i love wood thrushes too
putting Ripple Effect back on the shelf this morning i noticed i had another collection by Elaine Equi, 2013’s Sentences and Rain and i have absolutely no idea where it came from. must’ve picked it up secondhand somewhere
well so much for reducing the height of my current reads pile. but that’s a high-quality problem indeed. Ripple Effect was from 2007 and i was just thinking i should get one of her more recent books
i really dig the title poem:
Equi is certainly in that age-old tradition of the wise jester
well i just lost a fuck-ton of writing here because the WordPress iPhone app froze. i guess if i want to keep composing on my phone i’d better compose in Notes and paste it into the app when it’s done (i have been doing that to some extent already but not today obviously)
i stopped the car in Sinking Valley today on my way back from the Amish garden center to take a photo of our not-so-impressive mountain and captured what appears to be a UFO
putting up a deer fence, you do need to think like a deer. where they can push in, where they might be tempted to leap. if i were ever to move out west where they have mule deer instead of whitetails i’d have to start learning that stuff all over again. this is the kind of local knowledge one gathers over time. to the extent that old people can be said to be wise it’s because of stuff like this (not generally because of their politics, lord knows)
working in the garden after supper i can hear our neighbors out in theirs, a quarter mile away. well mainly the shrieks of their twin grandchildren, who are four years old and love living in the woods
there’s something really special about not only living where you grew up, but seeing and hearing other kids grow up there too. to use an old-fashioned phrase, it gladdens the heart
so i got the fence all moved and patched together and well as they say, a thing of beauty is a joy forever
also today i shot a brief video of a black rat snake pretending to be a rattlesnake which took me back to the first time i saw that, also on the powerline right-of-way, at the age of 12 or so and i thought it was a rattler ran all the way back to the house and either Mom or my older brother Steve went back with me and it was just a black snake being a jerk:
This entry is part 24 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April whippoorwills are back. two of them like dueling banjos out here as i cool down from puttering in the garden and going for the usual hike and puttering in the garden before that and going in town etc.
whipoorwhipoorwhipoor is what i’m hearing of their inane battle for vocal supremacy. once upon a time people in places as far-flung as Greenland and Yemen used to settle disputes with song contests though so i guess dueling banjos is better than an actual duel ya know?
this morning on the porch i finished my re-read of Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems as part of my never-ending quest to keep the current reading pile to a reasonable height. it was as always a blast. Equi is such a fun poet. why aren’t more poets fun?
actually poked some seeds in the soil today. and it felt as futile and ridiculous as ever. it’s a good thing i like being wrong
but whilst hoeing openings in the straw mulch i wrecked a nest of field mice — didn’t hurt any i don’t think but they were still blind and pretty helpless scattering in random directions. i scooped one out of the path and it just lay on the straw trembling. i laid a bit more straw on top of it to give it a fighting chance until i left and mama could come back and move her babies
that was part of my excuse for heading out on a mid-afternoon walk. also i wanted the openings to dry out a little before i stuck seeds in
the new Rumi arrived so i tucked it into my pack
Dear April there are few sights in nature more entertaining than the sight of a wild turkey fleeing at a fast trot. it makes me think the cretaceous period would’ve been equally full of humorously dorky creatures that would also eat you
i did get to see wood frog tadpoles—the doomed ones in the too-small pools that always dry out too soon. they appeared to be feeding on the remains of the egg masses. it quickly became too disturbing to watch, all that teeming and thrashing of tails
i do not care for teeming. in fact i don’t hold with it. it may be natural but that doesn’t mean i have to like it. the buddha was right, life is suffering
don’t mind me i’ll probably go back to being a Daoist tomorrow
anyway so i get to the bench and take out the book and realize why it was so cheap on eBay
so i got a review copy of a New York Review book. seems kinda collectible, right? except for one problem
the entire introduction is missing
do publishers really send out review copies before the introduction is finished? might this in fact be an earlier author proof?
the translation by Haleh Liza Gafori seems absolutely credible in every way, it’s a Rumi that actually reads like a medieval Sufi, translated in modern poetry as good or better than anything out there, as such an enduringly popular poet surely deserves
after reading a dozen or so Rumi poems with great satisfaction at their beauty and power i realized i just wasn’t in the mood for what he was selling actually
so this book probably won’t go on the current reading pile just yet. but it’ll be on the shelf when the mood strikes
i wish i could be more like my mom and methodically read every new book i get plus many many more from the library but i’ll never be half the reader she is. few people today are, i suspect
insert punditry here re: what it might mean for a literate culture to slowly lose its great readers and lovers of books, might we in fact now be post-literate etc. ad nauseum
my relationship with books may not be entirely healthy at least if you accept the once common belief that greed is harmful to the soul. i like owning books even though or perhaps because i can’t really afford to buy them. the problem is with most of the haiku i read, the presses are so small and the entire scene so invisible to academic poets, huge university libraries like Penn State’s don’t acquire them. a lot of the other small-press stuff i read would be a bit easier to get on inter-library loan, but not all of it…
like an addict i clearly have my excuses all lined up
i think i found a winter wren nesting spot down in the hollow but i’m not sure yet. i’ll keep an eye on it
also while waiting for a train to clear our crossing i took some pictures because people don’t believe me when i tell them i can see traveling urban art galleries at the end of our lane
late in the afternoon i paused to admire this massive old wild grapevine, which seemed pretty damn big when i was a kid 50 years ago:
there’s probably a haiku in there. hmm…
brown thrasher back for another spring ancient grapevine
but even when this loop of vine dies as long as there’s forest here this individual will go on, sprouting roots as needed and adapting to the ever-changing forest conditions over the course of who knows how long? i don’t think there’s any way to date them. they could go back 8000 years. it seems just barely possible
This entry is part 23 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April it was one of those rare mornings when both the sun and the moon were visible from my usual spot on the porch. not only that but a hermit thrush kept singing in the distance — many years we don’t hear them singing on migration. (sadly they don’t seem to nest on the mountain. we’re not high enough)
when the day starts out as beautiful as today did this time of year i’m always torn: go for a long walk or work in the garden
well today being earth day already the spring is getting away from me as usual so i figured i’d better dig in the dirt— and not fun stuff either like planting things but putting in new fence posts and moving the fence to expand the garden because (Samuel L. Jackson voice) i’ve had it with these motherfucking deer eating my motherfucking potatoes
but first to procrastinate in the best possible way: by banging out three erasure poems by ten o’clock. then outside to dig as the red-tailed hawks circled overhead and wild turkeys gobbled up on the ridge
of course digging holes on a mountaintop you have to expect to encounter a few rocks
that one gave me a good five-minute workout
i do love the smell of our heavy rocky iron-rich clay
after a couple of hours of that i headed off down-hollow to check on the wildflowers. the first rue anemones were just opening…
windflowers our annual exchange of nods
the hepaticas were blooming in profusion. “snow? what snow?”
even in the ditch with last year’s leaves this April sun
white pine fused to a hemlock tree creek voices
ya know people have a point, Appalachian hollows can look kinda creepy sometimes — a combination of long shadows and old things, half-rotted hulks and mossy leviathans
the mid-spring woods is a weird place with all these wildflowers racing to do their whole thing before the trees leaf out and they lose the sun. i love how whole communities can evolve to take advantage of such narrow temporal windows, like when a desert blooms after a rare soaking rain
spring forest the shadow of a vulture crosses my page
i’m two-thirds of the way through this Zang Di book and i’ve just found the third poem i feel as if i fully understand and it’s very good: “Scarecrow Series”
all about like effigies and doubles and the other and maybe i feel like i grok it because it’s something i happen to have given a decent amount of thought to over the years. more likely though it’s just a more straightforward less riddling poem
back up the mountain to start supper (venison casserole) then off to the other end of the property. Mom had said all the wood frogs were hatching in the vernal pools this morning and i should be able to get pictures but by the time i got there they had all buggered off to deeper spots. quite a few egg masses had been deposited in a shallow area that almost dried up completely at one point so it was great news that they’d made it to tadpole stage
sitting on the bench up there though i take another gander at the Zang Di book and find that something just clicked and now i seem to get most of his poems actually. i’ve had that happen with other somewhat difficult or arcane poets where because i think i’m a little slow on the uptake it can take me most of a collection before i learn how to read it. i’d argue that’s a good part of the fun of poetry: everyone gets to make up their own universe and they have to trust that a few readers will put in the work to understand what laws govern it
after supper more work on the fence moving project until dusk then sitting out on the porch watching a bat swoop back and forth. the hermit thrush was singing again. every day is of course earth day it’s a ridiculous thing to have to have a holiday for BUT today did feel especially earthy i have to admit
This entry is part 22 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April would i be a better reader if i were less comfortable with mystery?
a better scholar probably. but would i enjoy it as much? this Zang Di translation for example continues to delight and entrance but i often have only the fuzziest idea what he’s banging on about. “Riddles are serious,” he writes, “must I really prepare each step for you?”
I see you, Queen of Torture, and everything you’ve always been.
Do you think your Instagram ads and Botox siren songs fool me?
I see the eels behind your eyes and the skulls inside your smile; in your heart you are still torturing, and you love it.
Torture is your first love, your only love, your soulmate, your sex; torture is what you’re made of, torture is what you are.
You are inseparably one with the machine which tortures the poor, which tortures our ecosystem, which tortures children under blockades and starvation sanctions, which tortures our dreamworlds and our sacred seeds of disobedience.
We will beat the machine. We will win.
That primal clarity lives within us still, and you can only sedate a giant for so long.
kind of shocked to see Caitlin Johnstone end the essay on an upbeat note but she’s a good egg i think
steady rain and a midday social engagement kept me out of the woods till after supper. the leaf duff shines wetly like an amphibian instead of the usual shaggy mammalian look. fog forms around me as i type that last sentence and slowly dissipates
i decided i would rather be moist than hot is a real thing i just said to myself, concerning my decision not wear rain gaiters
i am finding so many fallen branches covered in jelly ears this evening. well the traffic noise from I-99 is pretty bad. maybe all those ears just couldn’t take it anymore
can one wallow in happiness? or is wallowing reserved for misery?
that may sound like a joke but i really need to know. wallowing is important to me. it feels as if i do quite a lot of it. but i don’t feel at all miserable
where snow just sat the red sporangia
mushroom ladder the sunset’s own waterthrush
met another hiker:
the first red eft of the year. pictured next to the aforementioned red sporangia. winter’s monochrome seems well behind us even though there are still a few small patches of snow (and lord knows we could get more)
what a crazy lifestyle. as with knights errant the death rate for efts is quite high but if they survive their years-long wandering they get to transform into an aquatic newt and spend the rest of their lives in a pond or spring BUT if it ever dries up they can un-metamorphose back to being a terrestrial eft and walk away. both are considered adult forms
at this point i’m a little annoyed at how literal my earlier likening of the forest floor to an amphibian has become
what does it mean to be found in a lost world? christians think they know. i am way more interested in being lost in a found world. at least as far as poeming is concerned
tongues of fog form in Sinking Valley as night falls. barred owls begin a conversation down ridge. the world is always speaking whether we listen or not
i suppose that’s what i meant yesterday by poetry as revelation. nothing particularly wootastic
i often can’t tell whether i’m serious or joking. that’s the danger with dark humor perhaps — after a while you might forget it’s supposed to be funny
“riddles are serious” indeed
what i just went on felt like a jaunt rather than a ramble. definitely neither a stroll nor a hike. a jaunty wander out with the efts. home in time to finish my erasure poem. and so to bed
This entry is part 19 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April forget drunken sailors, what shall we do with a poet who can barely use a pen?
trying to write bananas on a shopping list my hand gets lost in some kind of 70s folk-rock song going na na, na na na na. i add an s and squint at the result: it might be right. fortunately it’s a nearly illegible scrawl so who can tell
weird to lose that muscle memory though
(again with the muscle memory)
(i do keep a pocket notebook in my pack for when my phone poops out)
an email from Black Lawrence Press with the subject line 50% Off All Poetry Titles! got my attention pretty quick. i wish more publishers would put their money where their mouth is about poetry month. shared the good news on Twitter and ordered three books including two i’d been meaning to get for a while, Shanna Compton’s Creature Sounds Fade and Kristy Bowen’s sex & violence, plus [ G A T E S ] by Sahir Muradi
got a notice that a book i was really excited about had arrived at the post office box (no we don’t get delivery up here) so i thought i’d walk in town for it. it was sleeting but the forecast said snow. i can dress for snow i thought
don’t know why i don’t walk into town more often, it’s a little over two miles away and Tyrone is nothing if not photogenic. i don’t even mean that ironically
the I-99 overpasses are something of a feature. LIFE’S A BLUR says the graffiti. especially from the interstate, yes
i don’t have to go to the big city for a dose of urban bleakness
i was a bit shocked to see some graffiti promoting a website that preaches violent fascist revolution. a sign of the times?
i don’t know what they did to the surface of the sidewalk on the 10th Street bridge but i think i got a contact high
it started snowing pretty hard while i was in the post office
you might think given my usual snobbishness about cliched images that i would resist the temptation to take lots of photos of blossoming trees in the snow
you’d be wrong
snow on cherry blossoms beside Reliance Bank
but the snow wasn’t the only thing making the town seem a bit surreal…
as long as we have public librarians who do quietly subversive things like commission a painting of the Lorax on the sidewalk, i tend to think we’ll be OK as a society
the new country core shop at the end of the street has slightly terrifying window displays
then there’s the salvage yard…
honesty compels me to admit that i removed some racist graffiti from this image in processing — not to try to whitewash the town’s image but because if i left an n-word in, that’s all the photo would be about, inevitably, and i just wanted to focus on the aesthetic contrast here. that said i did keep a version of the photo with the hateful word intact for documentary purposes. like, this is America. Childish Gambino got it right
BUT a single (? let’s hope) hate-filled individual not only doesn’t represent Tyrone, s/he doesn’t even represent local street artists as the adjacent overpass demonstrates. shout out to these kids whoever they are
one appears to be a fan of Gardner’s ice cream parlor
a freight came along
the advice to be sic [sic] is certainly intriguing. are there pro-Covid radicals or is this just an old-school Satanist i wonder
the fun thing about walking up the mountain while it’s snowing hard is that it gets prettier as you climb. which does kind of seem like what should happen when you climb a mountain doesn’t it
i do worry about all the wildflowers and especially the flowering fruit trees of course. above is part of our trillium patch
these are not supposed to be white trilliums, they’re wake-robins. who probably wish they could go back to sleep
i never get tired of looking at snow on hemlocks though
there was one hepatica blossom still just visible, one exposed purple petal like an outstretched tongue
some black cohosh sprouts weren’t looking too happy
but damn the hollow was purty
the witch hazels are probably feeling pretty smug about their whole blooming-in-November deal
i tried drinking my tea on the one bench along the hollow road but my umbrella wasn’t really up to the task and my primary mission was to get the mail home dry and in one piece
as long a winter as we had, there weren’t more than half a dozen snows this pretty
so i’m not entirely crazy to celebrate the beauty of it, destructive as it is
a hen turkey trotted across the road in front of me and all i got was this lousy photo
i tend to forget this forsythia is here even though it’s right across from my house—when not in bloom it just kind of blends into the woods’ edge
a photo so obligatory i sighed as i took it. poor downcast daffodils
all in all a classic onion snow. and not a surprise because the poetry bloggers i follow who live out west got it last week. looks as if we’ve gotten about five inches now
if i’d brought a larger umbrella and worn my snow boots i could’ve stayed out longer but i was happy to get home and start the book i’d hiked in town for
Italian poet Elisa Biagini’s first collection translated in full
it’s a trip
at around four in the afternoon i sometimes feel a rush of happiness and i think that’s because four o’clock was when we got home from school after walking up the mountain
today i was happy like that so i made some decaf coffee and processed all these photos because why waste a good mood on just feeling good and i admit i’m not as free of the American obsession with productivity as i might like to think
after supper i finished the erasure poem i’d been working on. the second stanza is distinctly Simic-esque. wasn’t quite sure what tied the three stanzas together until i hit on the post title: Unseasonable
my Moving Poems co-blogger Marie Craven just reminded me of this video featuring the wonderful Australian spoken-word poet Caroline Reid
Reid calls it
A playful fusion of poetry, visual art and film in which a reflective middle-aged poet discovers that life’s interruptions to writing poetry are the very substance from which poems emerge.
exactly.
(Marie is planning to share more of Reid’s work on Moving Poems so keep an eye out for that)
This entry is part 13 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April there’s a cardinal nesting beneath my bedroom window
she’s sitting on three speckled eggs
our first hot day. sitting on a bench in the woods where i swear the same two or three bluebottle flies keep landing on me no matter how many i kill. no wonder people used to believe in spontaneous generation
the Zang Di book has already proved its utility as a flyswatter. well done Zephyr Press
Stir-fried pork and asparagus is a starting point for poetry.
Zang Di (tr. Eleanor Goodman)
i like this guy. his mind moves in interesting ways
this too in the middle of a well-used trail is language
coyote calling cards
hypothesis (clears throat): the invention of symbolic language by humans was essential to make up for the lost richness of meaning our more distant ancestors accessed through their noses
there’s a profusion of trailing arbutus blooms this year like nothing we’ve seen here in 52 years. not sure why. though i do have some hypotheses…
it’s maybe a bit unusual in the modern world to know exactly where you’ll someday be buried. i noticed today a porcupine has been littering the ground all around with spruce twigs (they’re messy eaters)
my future gravesite old puffball blowing smoke
barred owl calling up in the woods, just one disapproving-sounding who! at a time
for years, my ex heard me talking about bard owls and wondered what made them so poetic
sitting just inside the edge of the woods is a completely different experience from sitting on my front porch less than 100 feet away. a more vulnerable experience, especially after dark. a humbler experience
(when did humility stop being a virtue asks the old crank)
the porch offers the remove of civilization. a roof blocks most of the sky—it’s no wonder suburbanites long ago ditched porches for back decks
Last week I snowshoed down the ridge a ways to where a paved road crosses (the Skelp road, for you locals), beyond which Brush Mountain rises another hundred feet or so in a mildly spectacular fashion. It’s a good time of year to trespass on neighboring properties, since the last deer season ended in mid-January and no one is out. Looking at the view, I realized that it included the house of one of Pennsylvania’s best and most prominent eco-poets, my friend Todd Davis. Long-time Via Negativa readers will remember his poems featured here over the years. I jotted down a quick poem on my iPhone and emailed it to him (because, Mennonite that he is, he doesn’t have a smart phone) the next morning, along with this photo:
dear Todd
snowshoeing down
the ridge yesterday I saw
under the snow a mountain
and under the mountain your subdivision
your undivided vision landscape with poet I think
smiling to myself
as if there could be
any other kind
Yesterday Todd’s seventh full-length poetry collection Coffin Honey officially entered the world. Since I have an advanced reading copy (thanks, Todd!) I am here to tell you that it includes some of his best, and darkest, work to date. Here’s a sample.
The Book of Miracles
Despite Ursus’s approach
the fawn remains curled, delicate
calligraphy attempting to mimic
crinkleroot and leafduff.
Like a held breath, the disguise
falters, and the stream’s clapping
masks the bear’s shuffled gait.
With three nails, Ursus opens
the book of miracles and reads
the fawn’s newly written muscle:
ink the color of ginseng berries,
taste like copper wounded with salt.
The book of miracles, when recited,
sounds like tendon and cartilage
cracked, snap of shoulder moving
out of joint, slurp of marrow.
Before any of this, the heart,
sweetest and most joyous of meat,
is purchased by the mouth
with singing groans.
Such holy books aren’t new.
Ursus himself was resurrected
by the light that grows each day,
that causes everything to climb
upon the back of another
and eat until full.
What’s left of the fawn
doesn’t squirm in his belly,
but as Ursus sleeps, the doe-mother
forages where she left her child:
nipples aching, rivulets of milk
running down slender legs.
Until Darkness Comes
A 100-year-old gray and ductile iron foundry in Somerset, PA, has issued a closing notice to workers, according to local reports.
The white blades turn the sky: red-
eyed turbines blinking away the danger
of flying things. Small children float up
over the Alleghenies, parents chasing
the dangling ropes of weather balloons.
It’s hard to predict when a storm may blow through.
A boy huddles by a bedroom window, wonders
if his father knows where every deer hides
on the mountain. It’s his job to pull the sled
when his father makes a kill. He’s been taught
in school the wind that circles the blades carries
electricity to the towns where steel was made.
Three years ago his sister disappeared in the clouds,
heat lightning like veins in the sky. She sends a letter
once a month with a weather report and money
their mother uses for an inhaler. Most of the coal dust
has settled, but fires burn on the drilling platforms
and the prehistoric gas smells like the eggs that spoil
in the hutch when the hens hide them.
The boy never wants to leave this place.
Everything important is buried here: his grandparents,
a pocket knife he stole from his best friend, the eye-teeth
of an elk he found poached at the bottom of a ravine.
Yesterday in the barn a carpenter ant drilled a hole.
The boy bent to the sawed-circle and blew into it,
breath forced down into darkness. He dreams each night
of a horse galloping from a barn, mane on fire
like a shooting star. He prays for a coat sewn from pigeon
feathers, for small wings to fly over the tops of trees
where the children land when their balloons begin to wilt.
On summer evenings barn swallows careen like drones,
gorging dragonflies that skim the swamp.
The birds’ blue shoulders cant and angle, breast
the color of the foundry’s smokestacks as they crumble
beneath wrecking balls and bulldozers, extinguishing
the mill fires the boy’s grandfather never dreamt
would go out.
Watershed
When you go deep, following a winding river to its source,
you’re soon bewildered, wandering a place beyond knowing.
Hsieh Ling-Yün
Questions between branches roost in hemlocks along the stream.
Growing upward into the skull, the orange ghost of porcupine teeth scores the tree’s cartilage.
Answers unravel in creases, like the yellow yarn of witch-hazel flowers: folds folding over into narrowing passes.
This is the only way through.
A hundred thousand years ago the currents of an inland sea erected a sandstone altar.
If you look at the winding gap, the striations become clear.
As Ursus climbs higher, the stream winnows, speaking the names of the dead.
On the other side of the mountain, water flows in the opposite direction.
Sitting Shiva
If you find the bones of a bear, sit down and stay with them.
The dead desire our company. Touch each one—scapula,
tibia, ulna—even the tiniest bones of the hind and forefeet,
the curve of every claw. Just out of sight, a thrush will sing.
Bird song is a way to speak in secret. Find comfort
in the arbutus that whitens each March on the old logging road.
Wait until dark. A full moon will rise from the bear’s skull,
showing what she thought of us. Hold the moon-skull in your lap,
stroke the cranial ridges. You may see your dead father
scaling the talus to the blueberry field where this bear ate,
mouth sated and purpled by the sweetest fruit. Your mother
will be in the room on the second floor of the house, packing
and then unpacking a box of your father’s clothes. It’s hard
to give up this life. But we must. Others are waiting behind us.
***
Here’s the publisher’s description:
In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”
The more time I spend outside at night, the more fearful I become. You’d think it would be the opposite. But daytime rules don’t always apply. For example, it’s possible during the day to pretend there’s a hard and fast line between reality and imagination.
*
flickering
through skeletal trees
the bat’s back story
*
sunset
lava
on all screens
*
swamp tree
parodied by
its reflection
holding it
under
*
fire trucks
one after another
into the sunset
*
porcupine
grazing at dark
unreadable weeds
*
right at dusk
that old coyote-
shaped hole
nosing wild
onions
*
ruffed grouse
the split second
before LAUNCH
*
The angel with a flaming sword as a middle-aged gardener, standing astride the cosmos going whack whack whack at every planet unfortunate enough to have been parasitized by intelligent life.
*
your pale face
brushed by moth wings
without moon
*
barn swallows night nesting nesting
*
a glow
from the quarry
jacklighting deer
*
stars among clouds
I feel for
my missing teeth
*
sleeping
with the sky
for a quilt
the heat
of my sunburn
*
What does it mean to be a chaser of oblivion? Will the stars throw down their spears?
*
off alone
in the cosmos
forest pool
ripples left by
a bat’s swift drink
Process notes
Is this a haibun, a linked verse sequence, or just a bunch of haiku with some tanka and random thoughts thrown in? All of the above. What it really is is a bunch of things written at dusk or after dark on my Notes app. Since my phone doesn’t shoot good video in low-light conditions, though, it may or may not end up in a videopoem. It could also be the start of a new series. Time will tell.
